PTAB

CBM2014-00202

DealerSocket Inc v. AutoAlert LLC

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Key Events
Petition
petition

1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: System and Method for Assessing and Managing Financial Transactions
  • Brief Description: The ’099 patent discloses a computerized financial alert system for automobile dealerships. The system analyzes customer financial data to identify "pull-ahead" opportunities, where a customer may be in a favorable position to replace their current vehicle and financing arrangement with a new one, and generates alerts for the dealer.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Ineligibility Under §101 - Claims 1-3, 6, 8, 10-13, and 15-20 are directed to an abstract idea.

  • Core Argument for this Ground: Petitioner argued that the challenged claims are directed to the abstract idea of prospecting for sales leads using basic arithmetic and are implemented using only generic, conventional computer components, rendering them ineligible for patenting under 35 U.S.C. §101 as interpreted by Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank.
    • Abstract Idea Analysis: Petitioner asserted the claims fail the two-step Alice framework. At step one, the claims are directed to the abstract idea of identifying a sales opportunity by comparing a customer's current vehicle payment to a potential new payment—a fundamental economic practice known as a "pull-ahead" analysis. Petitioner contended this is a longstanding, manual business process.
    • Lack of Inventive Concept: At step two, Petitioner argued the claims lack an inventive concept sufficient to transform the abstract idea into a patent-eligible application. The claims merely recite generic computer hardware (e.g., processor, computer-readable medium) and functional software modules to automate the known business practice. Petitioner emphasized that using a computer to perform repetitive calculations on a large dataset for speed and efficiency is a conventional use of technology that does not confer patentability. The petition cited the inventor’s own pre-invention documents describing the process as a manual, time-consuming task, with the only "invention" being its automation.

Ground 2: Obviousness Over Prior Art - Claims 1-3, 6, 8, 10-13, and 15-20 are obvious over the combined teachings of the prior art.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Jones (Patent 7,249,322), Andersen (Patent 5,774,883), Krier (describing the Loyalty Strategies International system), and the known manual processes described in the declarations of VanCleave and Allan.
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that the claimed invention was a predictable combination of known elements. The declarations from VanCleave and Allan established that the core business method—prospecting for pull-ahead opportunities by manually calculating customer equity and comparing potential new payments to current payments—was a standard industry practice for decades. Jones taught the computerization and integration of dealership management systems, including generating "selling opportunity messages." Andersen taught using computers to structure and assess complex vehicle purchase transactions. Krier taught computerized data mining to identify customers "in equity" to generate leads for new car sales. Petitioner asserted that the ’099 patent merely applies the computerized systems of Jones, Andersen, and Krier to automate the well-known manual prospecting process described by VanCleave and Allan.
    • Motivation to Combine: A person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA) would have been motivated to automate the time-consuming and labor-intensive manual pull-ahead analysis to improve efficiency, scale, and accuracy. Combining the known computerized dealership tools with the known manual prospecting method was a common-sense business step to identify more sales leads from a dealership’s customer database than would be possible by hand.
    • Expectation of Success: A POSITA would have had a reasonable expectation of success in combining these elements. The combination involved applying conventional computer automation to a well-understood, formulaic business process, which did not present any significant technical hurdles.

4. Key Technical Contentions (Beyond Claim Construction)

  • Inoperability and Lack of Enablement: Petitioner argued that the claims are inoperable and not enabled under §112 because they require "determining whether the changed retrieved information may affect... favorability." The petition contended the patent only discloses a method for calculating a new payment based on all available financial variables, not a method for isolating the specific effect of a single piece of changed information. Therefore, the claimed method for making this determination is inoperable.
  • Lack of Written Description: Petitioner also contended that key limitations, such as "an information retrieval module... configured to determine when retrieved information has changed," lack written description support. These limitations were allegedly added in a 2010 amendment, years after the original 2004 application was filed, without corresponding support in the original disclosure.

5. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requests institution of a Covered Business Method Patent Review and cancellation of claims 1-3, 6, 8, 10-13, and 15-20 of the ’099 patent as unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. §§ 101, 103, and 112.