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✓ checked 8 October 2026 · sources: USPTO PatentsView bulk tables (grants through 31 December 2025), USPTO Open Data Portal PTAB trial records, the US Supreme Court docket, and Bright Data’s and Oxylabs’ own patent pages · method · caveats · download the data
On 6 October Oxylabs announced a new residential proxy product, saying “Constant innovation, an extensive patent portfolio, and a focus on ethics have allowed Oxylabs to become a global leader in the web intelligence collection industry” (press release). Bright Data, a competitor, says on its patent portfolio page that “Bright Data/Hola has filed over 48 patents, many of which are granted, while others are at earlier stages in the patent process, including dozens which are still unpublished.” The USPTO’s records show 219 US patents granted to Bright Data and its former names from 2012 to 2025. We looked at how that portfolio was built and what happened when other proxy companies challenged it.
Read this first. A patent count says nothing about whether a patent is valid, used or worth anything. Board decisions mentioned here cover the claims that were challenged, which aren’t always every claim in a patent. Filing continuation and divisional applications is a normal, legal part of the US patent system. This page is not legal advice.
Bright Data grants, 2012–2025 219continuations or divisionals 96.8%US average, 2024 grants 37.9%USPTO challenges to its patents 31
Headline numbers
- In 2024 Bright Data was granted 66 US patents, more than the 52 anti-bot, CAPTCHA and fingerprinting patents our keyword search found across every company that year. In 2025 the order flipped: 38 for Bright Data, 62 in the anti-bot set. A company count and a keyword search measure different things, so this is a sense of scale, not a like-for-like ranking.
- 212 of Bright Data’s 219 grants (96.8%) claim a continuation or divisional parent, meaning they build on an earlier application. Across all 324,040 US utility patents granted in 2024 the share was 37.9%. For the Oxylabs group it is 66.7% (48 of 72). All 66 of Bright Data’s 2024 grants are continuations or divisionals.
- Six titles cover 195 of the 219 grants. There are 22 distinct titles in all; 79 grants share “System and method for improving internet communication by using intermediate nodes” and 66 share “System providing faster and more efficient data communication”. The Oxylabs group’s 72 grants carry 29 titles.
- Other companies asked the USPTO’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board to review Bright Data patents 31 times between 22 November 2019 and 5 December 2023, covering 14 patents. 21 of the petitions came from Code200, Teso LT, Metacluster LT and Oxylabs, filing alone or together; 4 from NetNut; the rest from The Data Company Technologies, Major Data and BI Science (two each). The board declined to open 11 reviews, 4 ended in settlements, 2 were dismissed early and 14 reached a final decision.
- 13 of the 14 final decisions found Bright Data claims unpatentable or cancelled them. In 10 reviews of four related patents the board found all challenged claims unpatentable. The Federal Circuit affirmed on 1 August 2025 and the Supreme Court declined to hear Bright Data’s appeal on 23 February 2026. In all, the board’s final decisions found claims unpatentable or cancelled in 7 Bright Data patents. In the remaining decision, Bright Data replaced a patent’s original claims with amended ones, which the board accepted.
- Bright Data filed 7 petitions of its own against Oxylabs-group patents; none led to claims being cancelled. The board declined to open 4; in the other 3 it found no challenged claims unpatentable. All 3 of those were patents originally granted to IBM that Oxylabs now lists as its own.
- Bright Data’s patent-marking page lists 74 US patents. The newest was granted on 31 May 2022. On 8 October 2026 it still listed 6 of the 7 patents in which the board found claims unpatentable or cancelled. A patent can keep claims that weren’t challenged, and a marking page may refer to those. Oxylabs’ page lists 62 US patents.
Grants per year
| Grant year | Bright Data (incl. Luminati, Hola) | Oxylabs group | Anti-bot keyword set, all companies |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 3 | 0 | 35 |
| 2017 | 2 | 0 | 46 |
| 2018 | 0 | 0 | 52 |
| 2019 | 5 | 0 | 54 |
| 2020 | 11 | 4 | 58 |
| 2021 | 30 | 8 | 41 |
| 2022 | 23 | 22 | 61 |
| 2023 | 34 | 18 | 51 |
| 2024 | 66 | 11 | 52 |
| 2025 | 38 | 9 | 62 |
Bright Data’s first grant in our data is from 2012; the Oxylabs group’s first is from 2020. Earlier years: see the CSV.
Built from continuations
A continuation lets an applicant go back to an earlier application and claim another variation of the same disclosure; a divisional splits off claims the examiner said covered a separate invention. 147 of Bright Data’s grants claim a divisional parent. The six largest title families:
| Patent title | Grants |
|---|---|
| System and method for improving internet communication by using intermediate nodes | 79 |
| System providing faster and more efficient data communication | 66 |
| System and method for improving content fetching by selecting tunnel devices | 25 |
| System and method for URL fetching retry mechanism | 13 |
| System and method for streaming content from multiple servers | 6 |
| System and method for managing non-direct URL fetching service | 6 |
15 more grants from 2018 to 2020 went to Hola Newco Ltd. and Web Spark Ltd. Bright Data’s marking page lists 11 of them among its own patents. We kept them out of the 219 to match our earlier page; including them gives 234.
The challenges at the USPTO
An inter partes review (IPR) or post-grant review (PGR) lets anyone ask the Patent Trial and Appeal Board to cancel claims of an issued patent. These are the Bright Data reviews that reached a final decision:
| Review | Patent | Petitioner | Filed | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IPR2021-01492 | US 10,257,319 | NetNut Ltd. | 2021-09-03 | Final decision: all challenged claims unpatentable (affirmed on appeal) |
| IPR2021-01493 | US 10,484,510 | NetNut Ltd. | 2021-09-03 | Final decision: all challenged claims unpatentable (affirmed on appeal) |
| IPR2022-00103 | US 11,044,342 | Code200, UAB et al. | 2021-10-29 | Final decision: all challenged claims unpatentable (affirmed on appeal) |
| IPR2022-00135 | US 10,257,319 | The Data Company Technologies Inc. et al. | 2021-11-03 | Final decision: all challenged claims unpatentable (affirmed on appeal) |
| IPR2022-00138 | US 10,484,510 | The Data Company Technologies Inc. et al. | 2021-11-04 | Final decision: all challenged claims unpatentable (affirmed on appeal) |
| IPR2022-00353 | US 11,044,344 | Code200, UAB et al. | 2021-12-23 | Final decision: all challenged claims unpatentable (affirmed on appeal) |
| IPR2022-00687 | US 11,190,622 | Metacluster Lt, UAB et al. | 2022-03-14 | Final decision: claims 1–14, 16, 17, 20–24 and 26–32 unpatentable |
| IPR2022-00861 | US 10,257,319 | Code200, UAB et al. | 2022-04-18 | Final decision: all challenged claims unpatentable (affirmed on appeal) |
| IPR2022-00862 | US 10,484,510 | Code200, UAB et al. | 2022-04-18 | Final decision: all challenged claims unpatentable (affirmed on appeal) |
| IPR2022-00915 | US 10,257,319 | Major Data UAB | 2022-04-21 | Final decision: all challenged claims unpatentable (affirmed on appeal) |
| IPR2022-00916 | US 10,484,510 | Major Data UAB | 2022-04-21 | Final decision: all challenged claims unpatentable (affirmed on appeal) |
| IPR2024-00126 | US 11,616,826 | oxylabs, UAB et al. | 2023-12-05 | Final decision: all challenged claims unpatentable |
| PGR2022-00052 | US 11,272,034 | Metacluster Lt, UAB et al. | 2022-07-21 | Final decision: original claims 1–27 cancelled; substitute claims denied |
| PGR2022-00061 | US 11,349,953 | Metacluster LT, UAB et al. | 2022-09-26 | Final decision: original claims 1–34 replaced by amended claims 35–66 |
The Federal Circuit’s 1 August 2025 opinion, marked nonprecedential, describes Bright Data’s appeal of “finding the challenged claims of four of its patents unpatentable” and concludes: “We disagree and affirm the Board.” The Supreme Court docket for Bright Data’s petition (No. 25-779) reads “Feb 23 2026 Petition DENIED.” (docket).
And the reviews Bright Data asked for:
| Review | Patent | Patent owner | Filed | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IPR2021-00983 | US 10,601,948 | Metacluster Lt, UAB | 2021-05-21 | Institution denied |
| IPR2023-00185 | US 9,503,498 | oxylabs, UAB | 2022-11-15 | Final decision: no challenged claims unpatentable |
| IPR2023-00186 | US 9,516,091 | oxylabs, UAB | 2022-11-15 | Final decision: no challenged claims unpatentable |
| IPR2023-00187 | US 8,924,457 | oxylabs, UAB | 2022-11-21 | Final decision: no challenged claims unpatentable |
| IPR2023-00840 | US 10,965,770 | oxylabs, UAB et al. | 2023-05-11 | Institution denied |
| IPR2023-01441 | US 7,010,526 | oxylabs, UAB | 2023-09-27 | Institution denied |
| IPR2023-01442 | US 7,020,667 | oxylabs, UAB | 2023-10-04 | Institution denied |
What the companies list
Bright Data virtual patent marking page: “The following Bright Data technologies are protected by patents in the United States and other countries.” It lists 74 US patents: 63 granted under the Bright Data, Luminati or Hola names and 11 under Hola Newco or Web Spark. Oxylabs patents page lists 62 US patents: 51 granted to Oxylabs, Metacluster LT or Teso LT, 6 to Coretech LT and 5 originally granted to IBM.
For the wider picture of anti-bot and proxy patenting, see Anti-Bot vs Proxy Patents. For lawsuits involving scraping and proxy companies, see our residential proxy botnet and takedown timeline.
Method
Grants. USPTO PatentsView granted-patent tables (released with grants through 31 December 2025): g_patent, g_assignee_disambiguated, g_application and g_us_rel_doc. Bright Data means a disambiguated assignee of Bright Data Ltd., Luminati Networks Ltd. or Hola Networks Ltd.; the Oxylabs group means Oxylabs, UAB, Metacluster LT, UAB or Teso LT. Utility patents only, withdrawn patents excluded. The anti-bot set is the 675 grants matching our bot-detection, fingerprinting or CAPTCHA keywords in our earlier study.
Continuations. A grant counts if g_us_rel_doc lists at least one continuation, continuation-in-part or division relationship for it. Provisional applications and related publications don’t count. The same rule is applied to every 2024 utility grant for the baseline.
Challenges. We queried the USPTO Open Data Portal’s PTAB trials API for every patent in the Bright Data and Oxylabs-group sets and every US patent on the two companies’ marking pages (313 patents). That returned 38 proceedings. Outcomes come from the board’s own document titles and, where those were generic, from the order section of the final written decision. The appeal outcome comes from the Federal Circuit opinion in the board record and the Supreme Court docket.
Verification. A separate script re-reads the raw tables and saved records, recomputes every number and checks every quotation against its source.
Caveats
- Assignee names are as recorded at grant and disambiguated by PatentsView. Later sales, licences and name changes may not show, which is why we list the extra Hola Newco and Web Spark grants separately.
- Comparing a company’s total grants with a keyword search across all companies isn’t like for like; a keyword search misses patents that use other words.
- A board finding of unpatentability covers the challenged claims only. We report outcomes as recorded; we didn’t check court dockets for appeals other than the one noted, or for district-court cases.
- Settlement terms aren’t public in the board record, and a denied or settled review isn’t a ruling that a patent is valid.
- The marking pages were fetched on 8 October 2026 and may change.
Download the data
- Grants (CSV): every Bright Data, Oxylabs-group and anti-bot-set grant with filing date, title, continuation and divisional flags, marking-page listing and any PTAB proceedings, plus the 2024 baseline.
- PTAB challenges (CSV): all 38 proceedings with petitioner, filing date, status and outcome.
Cite as: ProxyPicker, “Bright Data’s Patents by the Numbers”, 8 October 2026, https://proxypicker.com/bright-data-patents/. Patent data: USPTO PatentsView and Open Data Portal (public domain).
Related: Anti-Bot vs Proxy Patents · Anti-Bot Census · NetNut, 98 Days After the FBI Seizure · The Week Scraping Rebranded for AI · How Scraping Cases End · Bright Data review · Oxylabs review.
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