PTAB

CBM2016-00008

Google Inc v. Zuili Patrick

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Petition
petition

1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: Method for Detecting Invalid Clicks in Web-Based Advertising
  • Brief Description: The ’057 patent discloses a method for identifying invalid clicks within pay-per-click online advertising systems. The invention aims to ensure merchants are invoiced fairly by generating and transmitting codes to track user clicks and determining click invalidity by examining the time difference between consecutive clicks originating from the same client device.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Obviousness over the IAB Study - Claims 1, 5, and 9 are obvious over the IAB Study.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: IAB Study (a collective reference for two publications from the Interactive Advertising Bureau: "Interactive Audience Measurement and Advertising Campaign Reporting and Audit Guidelines" (Jan. 2002) and "IAB Online Ad Measurement Study" (Dec. 2001)).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that the IAB Study disclosed all limitations of the challenged claims. The study taught using cookies that "uniquely identif[y]" a browser, which Petitioner mapped to the claimed "first code" generated by a server and sent to a client. The study further described how a browser click on an ad generates an HTTP request containing a target site URL, which corresponds to the claimed "second code" and "third code" obtained from the client device upon first and second clicks. Finally, the IAB Study disclosed filtering techniques for detecting invalid robotic activity by analyzing "consistent intervals between clicks," which directly taught the claimed step of determining invalidity by examining the time difference between clicks. Dependent claim 9, which recites storing the first code as a cookie, was also expressly disclosed.
    • Motivation to Combine: Not applicable as this ground relies on a single prior art reference.
    • Expectation of Success: A person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA) would have understood that the known techniques described in the IAB Study for tracking and filtering ad clicks could be readily implemented to achieve the claimed method.

Ground 2: Obviousness over IAB Study in view of Laurent - Claims 5 and 11 are obvious over the IAB Study in view of Laurent.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: IAB Study and Laurent ("Cookies," a publication by Simon St. Laurent from March 1998).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: This ground asserted that to the extent the IAB Study did not explicitly teach every limitation of dependent claims 5 and 11, Laurent supplied the missing elements. For claim 5 ("sending said second code"), Laurent explicitly disclosed a server sending a target site URL to a user device as part of a redirect response after detecting a cookie. For claim 11 ("the second code and the third code are encoded"), Laurent taught creating secure, encrypted cookies using HTTPS or SSL, which constituted a known method of encoding.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would combine the teachings of the IAB Study and Laurent because both references address the same subject matter of using cookies and target URLs to manage web interactions. Laurent’s teachings on redirects and security would have been seen as a simple, advantageous modification to the click-tracking system of the IAB Study. The combination involved applying known techniques to improve a known system, which would have yielded predictable results.
    • Expectation of Success: Petitioner argued this modification could be made with routine skill and without unreasonable experimentation.

Ground 3: Patent Ineligibility under §101 - Claims 1, 5, 9, and 11 are unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. §101.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Not applicable.
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued the claims were directed to the patent-ineligible abstract idea of "detecting invalid clicks based on the time between two requests by the same device." This fundamental concept, Petitioner contended, is a mental process that could be performed by a human examining a log of activities.
    • Key Aspects: The claims allegedly lacked an inventive concept sufficient to transform the abstract idea into a patent-eligible application. The recitation of a client-server environment, web pages, and communication networks merely described a generic technological context. The steps of generating, sending, and obtaining "codes" were argued to be nothing more than conventional data-gathering activities. The dependent claims added only well-known web technologies (cookies, encoding), which were routine implementations insufficient to confer patent eligibility. The patent’s own specification admitted that the invention could be implemented using conventional, non-novel hardware and software.

4. Key Claim Construction Positions

  • "code": Petitioner argued for the construction "a series of letters, numbers, or other symbols to represent or identify something." This was based on the specification's description of the code as a serial number or user identifier and was consistent with the parties' agreed-upon definition in co-pending district court litigation.
  • "invalid": For the purposes of the petition, Petitioner adopted the Patent Owner's proposed litigation construction of "clicks that do not reflect a bona-fide indication of interest," while reserving the right to argue the term was indefinite.

5. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requests institution of a Covered Business Method patent review and cancellation of claims 1, 5, 9, and 11 of the ’057 patent as unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. §§ 101 and 103.