WHO ARE THE ASSIGNEES BEHIND HEVC-ESSENTIAL PATENTS THAT NEVER ENTERED A POOL?
The purpose of this report is to conduct an independent, non-commissioned study on HEVC technology and provide a third-party assessment to various stakeholders. The primary aim of this report is to identify all assignees holding essential HEVC patents that lie outside existing patent pools or LOAs.
The report provides a comprehensive overview of the patent landscape for HEVC technology, offering in-depth insights into its essential patents. It aims to provide actionable, reliable information on HEVC essential patents to its stakeholders and to play a pivotal role in their campaigns.
The analysis helps stakeholders understand the full scope of HEVC essentiality beyond the formally recognized patent pools and highlights the blind spots in the HEVC patent licensing ecosystem.
Who will benefit:
- SEP Holders: To know leading assignees, portfolio understanding, and crafting licensing strategies.
- SEP Implementers: To know potential threats, FTO issues, and strategize licensing negotiations.
- Patent Monetization Firms: Discover assignees and their relevant portfolios for monetization purposes.
- Law Firms: To build litigation strategies for assertion or defence purposes.
- Patent Pools: Discover potential licensors to join their pool.
- AI Software Firms: To train their AI models with our comprehensive datasets.
What you’ll get:
We employed a four-phase approach to conduct this detailed study.
Phase 1: A comprehensive dataset of active, granted worldwide patents was built by covering the newly added features of the HEVC standard.
- Video Coding
- Video Encoding
- Video Decoding
- Prediction
- Filtration
- Bitstream
- 3D Video Coding
- Transformation & Quantization
- Multi-layer Video Coding
- Block-based Coding
- CABAC
- Screen Content Coding
We further identified patent families using combinations of keywords, CPCs, assignees, and citations, with a focus on the newly added features. We restricted our key strings to a priority date of ‘on or before April 13, 2013, to match the approval date of the first version of the HEVC standard.
Also, the obtained patent dataset was compared with patent lists published by patent pools such as Access Advance and Via Licensing.
Phase 2
We focused on identifying patents unrelated to the HEVC technology domain. An in-depth analysis of the title, abstract, and claims of each patent was performed to exclude patents limited to unrelated video processing or transmission domains, such as AVC (H.264), MPEG-2, or proprietary codec implementations. However, patents containing broad concepts relevant to both HEVC and other advanced video compression standards were retained for further assessment.
Patents already included in existing patent pools were excluded from the dataset to ensure the analysis focused solely on off-pool patents. After this filtration, over 1400 patent families remained.
Subsequently, the analysis was limited to assignees that do not appear in any existing patent pool. This resulted in a final dataset of over 800 patent families.
Phase 3
Categorization of all patents was performed based on newly added features, including Multi-layer Coding, Block-based Coding, Transformation & Quantization, and Screen Content Coding, among others.
Phase 4
A detailed manual analysis of each patent family in the list was performed without utilizing any AI algorithm to determine the essentiality of the claims with respect to H.265. Our team reviewed each patent family in detail and assessed its essentiality, providing rationale and excerpts from the relevant standards to support their findings. When evidence for each claim limitation was identified in the standard, we mark the family as essential and proceed to the next one. If a particular independent claim is found to be non-essential to the standard due to certain claim limitations, we reviewed the following independent claim for analysis purposes. Further, if no independent claim of that patent was found to be essential, we reviewed the other granted family member for essentiality purposes. We have marked a particular patent family as non-essential only after reviewing all granted family members.
Please note that our team has not conducted a prior art or invalidity search to determine the validity of the essential patents.
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