U.S. Patent Office Institutes Inter Partes Review in Response to Live Power's Petition to Cancel Claims of Genscape's '000 Patent

BOULDER, Colo., June 24, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- The U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board has instituted an inter partes review of the patentability of 3 claims of Genscape's Method for Monitoring Power and Current Flow patent (U.S. Patent No. 6,714,000 B2). The Board may not institute an inter partes review "unless . . . there is a reasonable likelihood that the petitioner would prevail with respect to at least 1 of the claims challenged in the petition."

Live Power's Petition challenged all 3 independent claims of the '000 Patent as being obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art. In view of certain prior art patents cited in Live Power's Petition, the Board stated, "[W]e are persuaded that the Petition establishes a reasonable likelihood that Petitioner would prevail on its challenge as to at least one of the challenged claims."

In response to a separate petition filed by Live Power, the Patent Board declined to institute review of Genscape's Apparatus and Method for Monitoring Power and Current Flow (U.S. Pat. No. 7,088,090 B2). The Board, however, determined that the claim phrase "a processor for receiving signals from the magnetic and electric transducers and generating data representative of the magnitude and relative phase of the respective magnetic and electric fields" in the '090 Patent is a means-plus-function limitation, which is contrary to Genscape's assertion in prior patent litigation between the parties (subsequently dismissed by Genscape) that the term "processor" should be construed according to its "plain and ordinary meaning." The Board's determination of this means-plus-function limitation in the '090 Patent will likely make enforcement of the Patent more difficult.

About Live Power:
Live Power headquartered in Boulder, Colorado currently operates a network of 100s of sensors that spans 18 states and 2 regional markets (PJM and ERCOT). The data is sold to utilities, generators and financial institutions that buy and sell electric power in the wholesale market. These customers use the data to manage their positions in this very volatile commodity market.

Live Power was founded by Pal Even Gaarder, a Norwegian physicist, who came to the U.S. in 2014 after building a similar grid sensing network in Scandinavia. The current CEO, Bill Townsend, has over 20 years of experience in building commodity trading data and applications.

SOURCE Live Power Intelligence Company NA LLC