November 18, 2019 -- Voip-Pal.com Inc. (“Voip-Pal”, “Company”) (OTCQB: VPLM) is very pleased to announce that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) has denied institution of all four pending petitions for Inter Partes Review (IPR) filed by Apple: IPR2019-01003, filed against Patent No. 9,537,762 B2; IPR2019-01006, filed against Patent No. 9,813,330 B2; IPR2019-01008, filed against Patent No. 9,826,002 B2; and IPR2019-01009, filed against Patent No. 9,948,549 B2. These decisions from the Patent Trial and Appeal Board are posted on the Company’s website.

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Additional Corporate Updates

• Voip-Pal has retained the services of Mountain View, California attorney, Lewis E. Hudnell III. Mr. Hudnell is an experienced patent litigation lawyer and very well respected in the Silicon Valley. He has already begun working with the Company’s technical team on their current appeals and will assume the role of lead litigator for Voip-Pal. Before founding his current firm, Hudnell Law Group, Mr. Hudnell was a principal in the New York office of Fish & Richardson P.C. For more information on Mr. Hudnell, visit www.hudnelllaw.com.

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• Dr. Ryan Thomas has stepped down from the Board of Directors of Voip-Pal due to health reasons. Dr. Thomas will stay on as an advisor to the Company.

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Emil Malak CEO of Voip-Pal stated, “We are grateful for Dr. Thomas’s service and we wish him all the best.”

Mr. Malak also said, “The most recent PTAB decisions again demonstrate the strength of Voip-Pal’s patents. We believe the Appellate Court will rule on our appeal in the first Alice § 101 motion by the spring of 2020. We are now preparing a second appeal following the most recent Alice § 101 decision made by the District Court in our second patent infringement lawsuit against Apple and Amazon. Though we are disappointed that an appeal is necessary, given the current lack of legal certainty that surrounds motions to dismiss based on § 101, we recognize that the final outcome in these types of cases is often decided following an appeal to the Federal Circuit.”

“Our opponents Apple, Amazon, AT&T, Verizon and Twitter have thrown every legal tactic at their disposal at us in order to drain us of our resources. They have so far filed a total of twelve IPR’s, two Alice § 101 challenges, a request for sanctions, an appeal of the PTAB’s decision in our favor, as well as other motions and legal papers. We are responding to them ferociously. We remain standing and we will not go away,” said Mr. Malak. 

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“We all recognize that the U.S. patent system has become biased in favor of infringers following the implementation of the America Invents Act and also due to the dramatic increase in successful subject-matter ineligibility attacks under § 101 following the Supreme Court’s 2014 Alice decision. Voip-Pal continues to urge the courts and politicians to address the serious damage to the patent system that these changes have wrought.”

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“We fully support USPTO Director Andrei Iancu and are grateful for his work in trying to level the playing field, both by reforming the PTAB to improve fairness and by addressing the current confusion in patent law regarding patent-eligibility due to Alice.”

 

“In my opinion, the only way to bring back credibility to the U.S. patent system is to repeal and replace the America Invents Act, and for Congress to revise §101 to prevent courts from striking down patents based on subjective and vague notions such as “abstractness.” Qualified experts at the Patent Office should deal with all the technical issues while the courts should only focus on infringement and damages.  Many §101 decisions today apply subjective or arbitrary criteria to invalidate patents at a very early stage of litigation—before the court has received any expert evidence on the technical issues or on how a skilled person in the field of the invention would interpret the patent. In effect, courts are rushing to invalidate patents without even giving patent owners a chance to submit evidence that the court needs to fully understand the patent.”

 

Patent attorney Robert Sachs stated in an August 29, 2019 article published by IPWatchdog.com:

 

“In the past five years, 781 unique patents have been held invalid in whole or in part by the federal courts. Compared with the five years prior to Alice, there has been a 1056% increase in the number of decisions finding ineligible claims, and a 914% increase in the number of invalidated patents.” (emphasis added)

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“This massive attack on patent rights is grossly unfair to patent owners,” said Mr. Malak.

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“We thank our shareholders for their continued support  We take this opportunity to wish our shareholders a very happy and healthy Thanksgiving. As always, patience is a virtue.”

 

A recent op-ed by Emil Malak on the current state of the U.S. patent system can be accessed with this link: Emil Malak Op-Ed.