PTAB

IPR2013-00503

comSCore Inc v. Moat Inc

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Key Events
Petition
petition

1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZER SYSTEM AND METHOD
  • Brief Description: The ’826 patent is directed to a method for providing statistical information by collecting, aggregating, and modeling both user "usage information" (related to a person's interaction with technology) and "transactional information" (related to information collected by the technology). The method involves applying statistical analysis to the modeled data and presenting the results for business intelligence purposes.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Anticipation by Kimball - Claim 1 is anticipated under 35 U.S.C. §102 by Kimball.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Kimball, R. and Merx, R., The Data Webhouse Toolkit -- Building Web-Enabled Data Warehouse, 2000 (“Kimball”).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Kimball, a book describing a data warehouse for web-based data (“Webhouse”), disclosed every limitation of claim 1. Kimball’s system monitors and captures user interactions with web servers (e.g., clickstream data from server logs) which constitutes the claimed “obtaining usage information by performing surveillance.” This captured data includes pages viewed and user dwell time, meeting specific examples of usage information recited in the claim. Kimball further disclosed obtaining “transactional information” by describing the capture of business transactions like product orders, sales data, and customer communications. The system aggregated this data from multiple sources into the Webhouse, performed “dimensional modeling” on it, and applied statistical methodologies through “data mining” techniques (e.g., clustering, classifying using "standard statistics") to generate statistical analysis. Finally, Petitioner asserted Kimball taught presenting the modeled statistical analysis information by describing a “Web-enabled” warehouse that delivers “data mining results” in a “browser-compatible format” to a user’s screen.
    • Key Aspects: This ground relied on the petitioner’s proposed claim constructions, arguing that under the broadest reasonable interpretation, Kimball’s disclosure of standard web data warehousing and analysis techniques met every element of the claim.

Ground 2: Obviousness over Kimball and Joshi - Claim 1 is obvious over Kimball in view of Joshi under 35 U.S.C. §103.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Kimball (as cited in Ground 1) and Joshi et al., Warehousing and mining Web logs, in Proceedings of the 2nd international workshop on Web information and data management, 1999 (“Joshi”).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: This ground was presented as an alternative to Ground 1, contending that even if Kimball alone did not teach the “presenting” limitation, the combination of Kimball and Joshi rendered the claim obvious. Petitioner argued Kimball taught all limitations of claim 1 except, for the sake of argument, the final step of “presenting the modeled statistical analysis information.” Joshi, which described a similar system for analyzing web logs and storing results in a data warehouse, explicitly disclosed a web interface for performing ad-hoc queries against data mining results and displaying those results to a user.
    • Motivation to Combine: Petitioner contended a person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA) would have been motivated to combine Kimball's data warehouse with an interactive web interface as taught by Joshi. The motivation was to solve the known problem of making complex data mining results accessible and useful to end-users. Providing a web interface for querying and viewing the data was a predictable, common-sense solution to allow users to make meaningful business decisions based on the analytical results stored in Kimball’s Webhouse.
    • Expectation of Success: A POSITA would have had a high expectation of success in implementing Joshi's standard web interface with Kimball's data warehouse system. The integration of a user interface with a back-end database was a well-understood and routine practice in the art at the time.

4. Key Claim Construction Positions

Petitioner proposed constructions for several terms under the broadest reasonable interpretation standard, arguing the terms were not terms of art and should be given their plain meaning informed by dictionary definitions.

  • "Transactional information": Proposed as “information related to conducting business or negotiations.” This construction was crucial for mapping Kimball’s disclosure of sales orders and customer communication data to the claim.
  • "Usage information": Proposed as “information about the act or manner of using something.” This broad construction allowed Petitioner to map Kimball’s disclosure of general "clickstream" data and web server logs to the claim.
  • "Performing surveillance": Proposed as “monitoring.” Petitioner argued this term, added during prosecution, did not imply anything beyond the routine monitoring of user activity on a web server, as disclosed by Kimball.
  • "Presenting": Proposed as “showing or exhibiting.” This construction was central to the argument that Kimball’s delivery of results in a “browser-compatible format” met the limitation, and it formed the basis for the alternative obviousness ground involving Joshi’s web interface.

5. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requests institution of inter partes review (IPR) and cancellation of claim 1 of the ’826 patent as unpatentable.