Sony v. Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC

I'll research this case across PTAB and district court records.

I'll research this case across the PTAB docket, the parallel district court litigation, and Federal Circuit activity.

I'll start by searching for coverage of this case and verifying the five IPWatchdog articles provided.

Let me verify the five IPWatchdog articles and whether they mention this specific IPR.

Short answer: there is essentially no press coverage of IPR2018‑01413 itself, and I could not verify that any of the five IPWatchdog articles supplied in the news index actually discuss this proceeding.

What the searches actually turned up

IPR2018‑01413 was a five‑month, pre‑institution proceeding that ended by joint motion on 2 January 2019 after the parties settled, and it produced no Board ruling on the merits. That profile — no institution decision, no final written decision, no briefing — is precisely the kind of docket event that the trade press does not write up. My searches on the case caption ("Sony Corporation et al. v. Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC"), on the patent number (9,769,477), and on the parties returned PTAB filings, patent front‑matter "OTHER PUBLICATIONS" citations, and litigation‑analytics pages — but no Reuters, Bloomberg Law, Law360, Ars Technica, The Verge, or JD Supra article about this IPR. The only third‑party descriptions of the proceeding I located are databases: Docket Alarm records it as "Terminated Jan. 2, 2019 … Status Terminated‑Settled" with APJs Georgianna Witt Braden and Kevin Cherry, and IPVerse/GreyB lists "Petitioner Counsel: Eric Buresh / Respondent Counsel: Neil Rubin" while mislabeling the respondent as "FALLON et al" (the inventors) rather than Realtime — a data artifact, not reporting. Note also that the "settled" characterization is an analytics inference; the Board's own Paper 10 terminated on the parties' joint motion and did not publish settlement terms.

The five IPWatchdog articles

I pulled the two whose text was reachable. IPWatchdog (2020‑11‑19) is a weekly roundup covering the Amtech/TransCore v. Kapsch EZ‑Pass suit, Viking Technologies' smartphone screen‑repair suits, and a music‑plugin competitor dispute, followed by an 18‑entry PTAB table (IPR2021‑00182 Nanoco/Samsung, IPR2021‑00057 Netflix/Avago, etc.). Nothing in it concerns Sony, Realtime, or the '477 patent. IPWatchdog (2020‑04‑09) is the same format — a PTAB table (IPR2018‑01766 Vitaworks/Hubei, IPR2018‑01513 Centripetal/Cisco, IPR2019‑00025 Sunoco/Magellan, and a set of GM/LKQ "Procedural Termination" entries) plus a 79‑matter district‑court table; I found no Realtime or Sony entry there either. Both articles post‑date the January 2019 termination by 15 and 21 months respectively, so they could not have reported it even in principle. The 2020‑04‑17 "Other Barks & Bites," 2020‑04‑01 "Robot Vacuum Wars," and 2020‑03‑25 "Medtronic/Huawei" items are the same weekly‑digest genre with the same timing problem. My assessment is that the news index matched these pages on generic strings ("PTAB," "Sony," "IPR," "Realtime") rather than on substantive discussion of IPR2018‑01413, and I would not cite them as coverage of this case. I flag this as a probable indexing error rather than a contradiction of the case metadata.

Where the case does surface in the press — indirectly

The '477 patent drew attention only as one of six patents in Realtime Adaptive Streaming's broader campaign, and the press coverage that exists is about that campaign, not this IPR. The Federal Circuit's precedential fee decision in Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC v. Netflix, Inc. is summarized on IPWatchdog's patents archive, which reports that the court "issued a precedential decision affirming a California district court's award of attorneys' fees in part to Netflix, Inc. for Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC's 'improper' litigation conduct," with Judge Chen writing and Judge Reyna "concur[ring]‑in‑part and dissent[ing]‑in‑part," and characterizing Realtime's forum‑shopping as "gamesmanship" amounting to bad faith. The underlying opinion, available via CourtListener, confirms the '477 patent was one of the six asserted in the Delaware action (with the '046, '462/'777, '535, '298, and '907) and states that "beginning from January to May of 2019, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board began instituting inter partes review proceedings for all six of the asserted patents on a rolling basis." That timeline is the closest the public record comes to situating Sony's petition: it was filed and terminated in the window before that institution wave, and it is mentioned only in passing in later filings — e.g., the Board's IPR2018‑01630 institution decision notes at 2 n.1 that "IPR2018‑01413 was terminated prior to the issuance of a decision on institution," and Google's later petition lists it among the '477 proceedings as "terminated Jan. 2, 2019."

Bottom line, and caveats

There is no press narrative for this case — no reported damages figure, no reported settlement terms, no executive statement, no analyst commentary keyed to IPR2018‑01413. The settlement was filed under a joint confidentiality request (per the termination decision, the parties sought authorization on 5 November 2018 and filed the joint motion plus separate confidentiality requests on 7 November 2018), so no terms entered the public record and none have been reported. Two sourcing limits I want to state plainly: I was unable to retrieve the full text of three of the five supplied IPWatchdog URLs (the 2020‑04‑17, 2020‑04‑01, and 2020‑03‑25 items), so my conclusion that they do not discuss this IPR rests on their date and genre rather than a line‑by‑line read — if a citation to 01413 exists in them, it would most likely be a single row in a weekly PTAB termination table, which would still not amount to substantive reporting. And I found no Law360 or Bloomberg Law item at all, which for a docket this short is unsurprising but does mean the absence of coverage cannot be fully distinguished from paywall inaccessibility.

Sources

• Patent Owner does not raise any such "significant relationship" here
• Trials@uspto
• Sony Corporation v. Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC
• Likewise, Google studied the Netflix IPRs and tailored its Petition based on those POPRs and institution decisions
• This is because it would not be possible to transmit live streaming data (such as a live video feed) at a transmission rate that...
• UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
• Decision Institution of Inter Partes Review, filed in Pure Storage, Inc
• * (54) _Apple Inc
• Asymmetric data decompression systems - - Riverbed Technology, Inc
• Patents Archives - Posts in Patents
• * 29 Final Written Decision, filed in _Apple, Inc
• Veritas Technologies LLC v

I'll research the counsel of record for the petitioner (Sony) in this IPR.

I have a strong lead — Erise IP represented Sony in parallel IPRs. Let me confirm the specific Power of Attorney and docket entries for IPR2018-01413.

The termination decision gives me the signature blocks. Let me verify the petition-stage Power of Attorney and attorney bios.

Counsel of Record — Petitioner side (Sony) in IPR2018‑01413

Framing note first. IPR2018‑01413 is a PTAB proceeding, not a district‑court infringement action, so there is no "plaintiff" in the Rule 7.1 sense. The plaintiff‑side party is the petitioner, and the case metadata's "Sony" understates the caption: the petition was filed in the name of Sony Corporation and Polycom, Inc. jointly, and both were represented by a single firm. There is no local counsel, no in‑house attorney of record, and no separately appearing corporate counsel — PTAB practice does not require local admission, and the record shows one law firm holding the power of attorney for both petitioners.

The Erise IP team (counsel of record for Sony Corporation and Polycom, Inc.)

Service/correspondence: eric.buresh@eriseip.com, abran.kean@eriseip.com, jennifer.bailey@eriseip.com, chris.schmidt@eriseip.com, plus the firm's ptab@eriseip.com address; telephone (913) 777‑5600. The power of attorney was executed for Sony by Tomonori Okuwaki, Senior General Manager, Intellectual Property Division — the corporate signatory, not counsel of record.

How this is grounded

• The Board's 2 January 2019 termination decision (Paper 10) carries the petitioners' signature block verbatim: "Eric A. Buresh / Abran J. Kean / Jennifer C. Bailey / Chris R. Schmidt, ERISE IP, P.A." (decision text). That is the strongest direct evidence of who was on the record at termination. The same decision recites that Sony and Polycom requested authorization on 5 Nov 2018 and filed the joint motion and separate joint requests to keep the settlement agreement confidential on 7 Nov 2018.
• The GreyB/IPVerse analytics page independently lists "Eric Buresh" as petitioner counsel for IPR2018‑01413 (link).
• The Power of Attorney in the companion matter Sony Corp. & Polycom, Inc. v. Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC, IPR2018‑01299 (the '907 patent, filed June 2018), appoints the identical four Erise attorneys — lead Buresh; backup Kean, Bailey, Schmidt — with the same Kansas and Colorado addresses (POA). The same team also handled Sony's IPR2018‑01439.
• Bios: Erise IP bio for Buresh; Super Lawyers profile; Best Lawyers.

Caveats and contradictions to flag

1. I could not pull the IPR2018‑01413 petition-stage Power of Attorney itself (the PTAB docket document is behind Docket Alarm/PTACTS). The four‑attorney roster above is confirmed at the point of termination; the filing‑day roster is inferred from the identical, contemporaneous IPR2018‑01299 POA. It is possible the team composition shifted slightly between July 2018 and January 2019, though nothing in the record suggests it did.
2. A clerical oddity in the termination decision: its caption names the patent owner as "REALTIME DATA LLC" (rather than Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC), and one ordering paragraph directs that the confidential exhibits be kept "separate from the files of U.S. Patent No. 9,762,907" (the patent at issue in IPR2018‑01299, not the '477 patent here). This appears to be carry‑over text from the companion proceeding, not a substantive amendment of the parties. Treat party/patent identification in the Board's caption with that in mind — a direct contradiction with the case metadata on the patent owner's name.
3. Registration number discrepancy: an older Erise filing (IPR2018‑00047) prints Buresh's Reg. No. as "50,594"; the Sony POAs and the later filings consistently use 50,394, which I have adopted.
4. Polycom's separate representation: the Board's decision lists only Erise for both petitioners. If Polycom retained separate PTAB counsel, it does not appear in the termination document. I found no such filing — but I also cannot exclude a short‑lived separate appearance.
5. Do not confuse this with the district‑court team. In the parallel Delaware action, Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC v. Sony Electronics, Inc., No. 1:17‑cv‑01693 (D. Del.), Sony was the defendant, represented by Jack B. Blumenfeld and Rodger D. Smith II (Morris, Nichols, Arsht & Tunnell, Wilmington — Delaware counsel) together with Gregory S. Gewirtz, Jonathan A. David and Alexander Solo (Lerner David, New Jersey — lead trial counsel), per the Justia docket (link). None of them appear in the IPR. Sony Corporation itself was voluntarily dismissed from the Delaware case in December 2017 (D.I. 9), leaving Sony Electronics as sole defendant.
6. Adverse counsel, for completeness: the patent owner was represented by Neil A. Rubin and Kent Shum of Russ August & Kabat, Los Angeles (the firm that ran the Realtime campaign), per the same termination decision. Note that GreyB's "Respondent Counsel: Neil Rubin" entry is consistent with this, not a separate appearance.

Counsel of Record — IPR2018-01413 (Sony Corp. et al. v. Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC, U.S. Pat. 9,769,477)

Threshold point on posture

The metadata here is the PTAB proceeding, not the infringement suit. In an IPR the patent owner is the respondent/defendant-side party and the petitioner is the nominal plaintiff. So the "defendant's counsel" question splits into two answers:

1. In IPR2018-01413 itself — Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC (Patent Owner; respondent).
2. In the underlying infringement case — Sony Electronics, Inc., the named defendant in Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC v. Sony Electronics, Inc., No. 1:17-cv-01693 (D. Del.), which is the real "patent infringement case" behind this petition.

I've given both, because the IPR-side answer alone would leave the actual infringement defendant's counsel unaddressed.

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1. Counsel for Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC (Patent Owner / respondent in the IPR)

Both signed Realtime's § 42.10(b) power of attorney in the same-patent companion proceeding, IPR2018-01187 (Paper 6, filed June 22, 2018): "Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC … hereby appoints the following practitioners … Neil A. Rubin, Reg. No. 67,030 … Kent Shum, Reg. No. 61,117 … 12424 Wilshire Blvd., 12th Fl., Los Angeles, CA 90025," executed by Richard G. Tashjian, Managing Member of the LLC. The identical Rubin/Shum appointment appears in Realtime's POA in Sony's sibling petition IPR2018-01299 (filed July 17, 2018), i.e., two weeks before Sony filed the '477 petition.

Sourcing caveat: I retrieved the Realtime POA and service documents from IPR2018-01187 and IPR2018-01299 (same patent / same petitioner group / same filing window) and the counsel-of-record listing for IPR2018-01413 from PTAB analytics, but I did not directly retrieve the paper-by-paper docket text of IPR2018-01413's own POA. The attribution of Rubin and Shum to 01413 is therefore highly reliable but is an inference from the paired filings rather than a quotation from 01413's Paper 3/4.

Post-termination change — do not misapply to 01413: In August 2019 (i.e., after 01413 was terminated on Jan. 2, 2019), Realtime designated new lead counsel in the surviving '477 IPR: Joel P.N. Stonedale (Reg. No. 76,924) of Noroozi PC, Austin, TX, as lead, with Kayvan B. Noroozi (pro hac vice, Noroozi PC, Los Angeles) as first back-up, retaining Rubin and Shum as back-up (Realtime's Updated Mandatory Notices, IPR2018-01187, Paper 31, Aug. 23, 2019). Noroozi PC had no appearance in 01413.

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2. Counsel for the petitioner (Sony) — for completeness

• Eric A. Buresh (Reg. No. 50,394) — lead counsel, Erise IP, P.A., 7015 College Blvd., Suite 700, Overland Park, KS 66211 (913-777-5600).
• Abran J. Kean (Reg. No. 58,540) — back-up, Erise IP, Greenwood Village, CO.
• Jennifer C. Bailey (Reg. No. 52,583) and Chris R. Schmidt (Reg. No. 63,982) — back-up, Erise IP, Overland Park, KS.

This slate is quoted from Sony's power of attorney in IPR2018-01299 (executed June 22, 2018 by Tomonori Okuwaki, Senior General Manager, Sony Corporation IP Division), and IPVerse lists Buresh as petitioner counsel for 01413. Same caveat as above: derived from the parallel Sony petitions, not a pull of 01413's own POA.

Party note / flag: Docket Alarm's party field for IPR2018-01413 includes Polycom, Inc., and the petitions in the companion Sony matters are captioned "Sony Corporation and Polycom, Inc."; court citations to 01413 use "Sony Corporation et al." I could not confirm from the 01413 caption itself that Polycom was a named petitioner, so treat Polycom's participation in 01413 as probable but unverified.

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3. Counsel for Sony Electronics, Inc. in the parallel D. Del. infringement case

Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC v. Sony Electronics, Inc., No. 1:17-cv-01693-JFB-SRF (D. Del., filed Nov. 21, 2017).

Source: Sony's opening brief caption block ("OF COUNSEL: Gregory S. Gewirtz, Jonathan A. David … LERNER DAVID LITTENBERG KRUMHOLZ & MENTLIK LLP … Attorneys for Defendant Sony Electronics Inc." / "MORRIS, NICHOLS, ARSHT & TUNNELL LLP, Jack B. Blumenfeld (#1014), Rodger D. Smith II (#3778)") and the D. Del. docket entry of Jan. 22, 2018 adding Gewirtz, David and Solo pro hac vice. UniCourt's attorney list for the case matches these five names exactly.

Two accuracy notes on that docket: (i) Sony Corporation was dismissed from the Delaware case by stipulation in December 2017, leaving Sony Electronics as the sole defendant; (ii) the case was dismissed by joint motion on Nov. 1–5, 2018 — roughly two months before the Board terminated 01413 — with prejudice as to Realtime's claims and without prejudice as to Sony's.

For contrast, Realtime's side in Delaware was Russ August & Kabat (Marc A. Fenster, Reza Mirzaie, Brian D. Ledahl, C. Jay Chung, Philip X. Wang, Sara E. Bussiere; later Timothy T. Hsieh and Paul A. Kroeger pro hac vice) with Bayard, P.A. (Stephen B. Brauerman) as local counsel — i.e., the same RAK team that defended Realtime at the PTAB.

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Gaps and warnings

• No sealed or missing appearances: 01413 was a public docket that terminated before institution; nothing suggests sealed filings. Realtime plainly appeared (it filed a POA and updated mandatory notices in the parallel '477 proceeding). But because no preliminary response was ever due (termination came ~5 months after filing, before any institution decision — see IPR2018-01630, Paper 13 at 2 n.1, noting "IPR2018-01413 was terminated prior to the issuance of a decision on institution. IPR2018-01413, Paper 10"), the 01413 record contains no substantive attorney-signed briefing. The counsel identification rests on the POA/mandatory-notice papers, not on litigated submissions.
• I did not verify the individual attorneys' bar numbers, current firm affiliations (as of 2026), or case histories beyond what the filings themselves show. I have deliberately not characterized any attorney's win/loss record, since I found no reliable source for that.
• The Board panel for 01413 is listed as Administrative Patent Judges Georgianna W. Braden and Kevin W. Cherry (Docket Alarm); the same two sat on the Netflix '477 institution decision with Judge Jivani.