PTAB

CBM2016-00032

Ibg LLC v. Trading Technoligies Intl Inc

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Petition
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1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: GUI for Electronic Trading
  • Brief Description: The ’999 patent discloses a graphical user interface (GUI) for electronic trading of financial instruments. The system displays market information, including bid and offer quantities, along a static vertical price axis and allows a trader to place an order by selecting an icon and moving it to a desired price level on the axis.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Patent Ineligibility under 35 U.S.C. §101 - Claims 1-35 are directed to an abstract idea.

  • Core Argument for this Ground: Petitioner argued that claims 1-35 are unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. §101 because they are directed to the abstract idea of graphing bids and offers to assist a trader in making an order. The petition asserted this fails the two-step test established in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Int'l.
    • Alice Step 1 (Abstract Idea): The claims were characterized as being directed to a fundamental economic practice—graphically displaying market data to facilitate trading—which is a longstanding concept that can be performed mentally or with pen and paper. The claimed method was described as simply a computerized implementation of this abstract concept.
    • Alice Step 2 (Inventive Concept): Petitioner contended the claims lack an inventive concept, adding only well-understood, routine, and conventional activities to the abstract idea. These activities include using a generic computer, receiving and displaying market data, and employing common GUI operations like "drag-and-drop." The claims were argued not to improve computer functionality but merely to use a computer as a tool to perform an abstract business method more quickly. The dependent claims were alleged to add only other conventional display concepts without providing a patent-eligible inventive step.

Ground 2: Obviousness over TSE, Schott, and Subler - Claims 1-23, 26-28, and 31-35 are obvious over the combination of these references.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: TSE (a Tokyo Stock Exchange publication from 1998), Schott (Patent 5,619,631), and Subler (Patent 5,646,992).

  • Core Argument for this Ground:

    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that the primary reference, TSE, disclosed an electronic trading GUI that met most limitations of the independent claims. TSE taught a "Board Screen" with a vertical price column (a "scaled axis of prices") alongside which alphanumeric indicators for bid and offer quantities were displayed. Order entry in TSE was performed via a point-and-click operation. To supply the missing elements, Petitioner asserted that Subler explicitly taught a GUI for placing orders by selecting an item's icon and moving it, including a specific "drag-and-drop" operation. Schott was cited for teaching the use of graphical indicators (e.g., bars of varying sizes) to represent data like quantity, as well as using visual characteristics like color and texture to distinguish different data sets on a display.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would combine Subler's drag-and-drop functionality with TSE's trading interface as a simple substitution of one known GUI technique (point-and-click) for another (drag-and-drop). This combination would predictably increase the speed and efficiency of order entry. Similarly, a POSITA would be motivated to replace TSE's alphanumeric indicators with Schott's graphical indicators (e.g., horizontal bars corresponding to quantity) to allow traders to absorb market information more quickly and effectively.
    • Expectation of Success: A POSITA would have had a reasonable expectation of success because the combination involved applying well-known, conventional GUI elements to a known electronic trading system. Drag-and-drop was described as a "cornerstone of the modern GUI," and implementing it in TSE's system would have been a predictable design choice with predictable results.

  • Additional Grounds: Petitioner asserted additional obviousness challenges, including:

    • The combination of TSE, Schott, Subler, and Jackson (WO 97/06492) renders claims 24-25 obvious. Jackson taught a GUI allowing a user to change the variables displayed on a chart's axes, which Petitioner argued would motivate a POSITA to make the price axis in TSE user-selectable (e.g., to switch between price and yield).
    • The combination of TSE, Schott, Subler, and Lozman (Patent 5,689,651) renders claims 29-30 obvious. Lozman taught displaying a histogram of trading volume along a price axis, motivating a POSITA to add a graphical volume display to TSE's interface.

4. Key Claim Construction Positions

  • “axis of prices”: Petitioner proposed the construction "a reference line for plotting prices, including labeled, unlabeled, visible and invisible reference lines." This broad construction was argued to be necessary because the term does not appear in the specification, which instead refers to a "value axis," and was important to show that the price column in the TSE prior art met this limitation.
  • “indicators,” “icons,” and “tokens”: Petitioner argued these terms should be construed as interchangeable, each meaning "a symbol such as an alphanumeric character or a graphic representation of an item." This construction was central to the argument that TSE's alphanumeric quantity displays met the claim limitation of displaying "indicators" and that Subler's movable graphical representations met the "order icon" limitation.

5. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requested institution of a Covered Business Method (CBM) review and cancellation of claims 1-35 of the ’999 patent as unpatentable.