PTAB

IPR2014-00421

Qualtrics LLC v. OpinionLab Inc

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Key Events
Petition
petition

1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: Receiving and Reporting Page-Specific User Feedback Concerning One or More Particular Web Pages of a Website
  • Brief Description: The ’668 patent describes a system and method for collecting user feedback on a specific webpage. The system uses a selectable "icon" on the webpage that, when activated, communicates a request to a remote computer system—separate from the user's computer and the website's host server—which then serves a "feedback window" to the user.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Anticipation over McDonald - Claims 1, 4, 5, 7, 11, 14, 15, and 17 are anticipated by McDonald under 35 U.S.C. §102.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: McDonald (a 1998 paper from Sandia National Laboratories titled "Multimedia Feedback Systems for Engineering").
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that McDonald disclosed every element of the challenged claims. McDonald described a "Web Page Commenting" system that places a "feedback link" (the claimed "icon") on a webpage. Clicking this link automatically sends an HTTP request to a "Web Database Server" to retrieve a "make a comment" web form (the claimed "feedback window"). Critically, Petitioner asserted that McDonald's architecture diagrams (Figs. 2 and 4) explicitly illustrated three separate computer systems: the user's computer ("Web Browser"), the website host ("any web server"), and the remote feedback system ("Web Database Server"). This remote server receives the request, serves the feedback window, collects the page-specific feedback (including the source page URL), and provides reports to the website owner.
    • Key Aspects: The core of this argument was that the very feature relied upon for allowance during prosecution—the use of three distinct computer systems—was expressly disclosed in McDonald's system architecture.

Ground 2: Obviousness over McDonald in view of Pinsley - Claims 1, 4, 5, 7, 11, 14, 15, and 17 are obvious over McDonald in view of Pinsley under 35 U.S.C. §103.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: McDonald (the 1998 Sandia paper) and Pinsley (Patent 6,070,145).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner contended that McDonald taught most claim limitations. If the Board were to find McDonald did not explicitly disclose a remote computer system for hosting the feedback functionality, Pinsley supplied this missing element. Pinsley described a system for conducting web surveys where a "graphic image" on an "Advertiser's Web Site" links to a survey hosted on a separate "surveyor's computer site." Pinsley’s figures and description explicitly detailed a three-computer architecture (user, advertiser site, and remote surveyor site) for the express purpose of hosting a survey/feedback tool.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would combine McDonald and Pinsley because they addressed the same problem (collecting user feedback from a webpage) using the same basic technology (a clickable icon/link that opens a feedback form). A POSITA would have been motivated to implement McDonald’s feedback system using the remote hosting architecture taught by Pinsley to gain known benefits like reduced load on the primary web server, enhanced security, and easier management of the feedback service, which was a routine industry practice.
    • Expectation of Success: Success would have been expected, as combining the references merely involved directing the HTML link in McDonald's system to a URL hosted on a remote server, as explicitly taught by Pinsley. This was a straightforward application of well-understood web technologies.

Ground 3: Obviousness over OpinionLab Website in view of Pinsley or McDonald - Claims 1, 4, 5, 7, 11, 14, 15, and 17 are obvious over the OpinionLab Website in view of Pinsley or McDonald under §103.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: OpinionLab Website (publicly available pages from www.opinionlab.com as of 2001), Pinsley (’145 patent), and McDonald (the 1998 Sandia paper).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that the OpinionLab Website, which belonged to the Patent Owner, disclosed nearly every element of the claims, including a "[+]" feedback icon that opened a "Comment Card" (feedback window) to collect page-specific ratings and comments. The examiner had previously allowed the claims over this reference solely because it was not found to teach hosting the feedback window on a remote computer system. Petitioner asserted this final limitation was supplied by either Pinsley or McDonald.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would have been motivated to implement the functionality shown on the OpinionLab Website using the remote hosting architecture disclosed in Pinsley or McDonald for the same reasons as in Ground 2. It was a well-known and advantageous design choice to offload specialized services like feedback collection to a third-party server. Implementing the OpinionLab system on a remote server was merely the application of a known technique (remote hosting) to a known system (OpinionLab's feedback tool) to achieve a predictable result.
    • Expectation of Success: A POSITA would have had a high expectation of success, as it required only configuring the OpinionLab Website's feedback icon to link to a feedback form hosted on a different server, a routine task for a web developer at the time.

4. Key Claim Construction Positions

  • "icon": Petitioner proposed the broadest reasonable construction as a "graphical image(s), optionally with text." This construction was argued to be consistent with the specification's examples (e.g., "(-)") and broad enough to cover the "feedback link" disclosed in McDonald and the "graphic image" in Pinsley.
  • "remote computer system that is separate from a computer system hosting the website": Petitioner argued this term should be given its plain meaning: "a computer system that is different from the computer system hosting the website." This construction was central to the invalidity arguments, as Petitioner asserted both McDonald and Pinsley explicitly disclosed architectures with physically and logically separate servers for website content and feedback/survey functions.

7. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requests the institution of an inter partes review and the cancellation of claims 1, 4, 5, 7, 11, 14, 15, and 17 of the ’668 patent as unpatentable.