PTAB

IPR2014-00871

Cisco Systems Inc v. Constellation Technologies LLC

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1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: System and Method for Broadband Multi-User Communication Sessions
  • Brief Description: The 6,845,389 patent discloses a system and method for establishing multi-user communication sessions, such as online games, over a network. The technology uses known internet protocols to allow users to exchange messages that specify Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, reserve necessary network resources, and confirm session setup.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Obviousness over the Rosenberg Combination - Claims 1-3, 5-16, 18-25, and 34-41 are obvious over RFC 2543, RFC 2205, RFC 2327, and Rosenberg.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: RFC 2543 ("SIP: Session Initiation Protocol," Mar. 1999), RFC 2205 ("Resource ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP)," Sep. 1997), RFC 2327 ("SDP: Session Description Protocol," Apr. 1998), and Rosenberg ("Establishing QoS and Security Preconditions for SDP Sessions," Jun. 1999). Petitioner collectively refers to these as the "Rosenberg Combination."
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that the Rosenberg Combination taught every element of the challenged claims. RFC 2543 (SIP) discloses the claimed method of initiating a multi-user session by sending an "INVITE" message (the "session participation request"), receiving a "200 OK" message (the "negotiating message"), and sending an "ACK" message to confirm the session. RFC 2327 (SDP) was designed to work with SIP to describe session parameters, including media types and QoS requirements, within the body of SIP messages. RFC 2205 (RSVP) provides a well-known protocol for reserving network resources to satisfy QoS requirements. Critically, Rosenberg explicitly proposes combining these protocols, teaching the use of extended SDP attributes within SIP messages to establish QoS and security as preconditions for a session, leveraging RSVP to reserve the necessary network resources before the session begins. This combination directly maps to the claimed sequence of exchanging QoS requirements, determining resource availability, reserving resources, and acknowledging the completion of QoS provisioning.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would combine these references because they were explicitly designed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to be interoperable parts of a comprehensive multimedia architecture. Rosenberg provides an explicit motivation, stating its purpose is to make network QoS establishment (using protocols like RSVP) a precondition to sessions described by SDP and initiated by SIP. This solves the known problem of poor communication quality in multi-user sessions due to insufficient network resources.
    • Expectation of Success: A POSITA would have had a high expectation of success because the references were standard, well-documented protocols from the same standards body (IETF) intended to function together to achieve the claimed result.

Ground 2: Obviousness over the Rosenberg Combination in view of Leigh - Claim 4 is obvious over the Rosenberg Combination in further view of Leigh.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: The Rosenberg Combination and Leigh ("Issues in the design of a flexible distributed architecture for supporting persistence and interoperability in collaborative virtual environments," 1997).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: This ground addresses claim 4, which adds the limitation of specifying a "latency requirement." Petitioner contended that the Rosenberg Combination established the base system for setting up a session with QoS requirements. Leigh, which addresses collaborative virtual environments analogous to the patent's e-gaming context, explicitly teaches that latency is a critical QoS parameter and discloses declaring a desired latency to ensure system performance.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would combine Leigh's teaching with the Rosenberg Combination to improve the performance of the underlying communication session. Since latency was a known and critical problem for interactive applications like gaming, it would have been an obvious design choice to incorporate a latency parameter into the existing SDP-based QoS framework taught by the Rosenberg Combination. Adding this known QoS parameter to the known system would yield the predictable result of improved session quality.

Ground 3: Obviousness over the Rosenberg Combination in view of Schulzrinne - Claim 17 is obvious over the Rosenberg Combination in further view of Schulzrinne.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: The Rosenberg Combination and Schulzrinne ("Interaction of Call Setup and Resource Reservation Protocols in Internet Telephony," Jun. 1999).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: This ground challenges claim 17, which adds the step of "preparing billing records in response to the reserved resources and QoS requirements." Petitioner argued that Schulzrinne (co-authored by Rosenberg) directly addresses billing for sessions established using SIP and resource reservation protocols. Schulzrinne teaches embedding resource reservation information into the session description and collecting accounting information for IP packets sent using reserved resources, allowing users to be billed based on usage.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would combine Schulzrinne with the Rosenberg Combination for a clear commercial reason: to enable network providers to bill for the resources consumed during a communication session. Since the Rosenberg Combination establishes a session with reserved resources, incorporating Schulzrinne's method for tracking and billing for those resources would have been a logical and obvious extension to create a commercially viable service.

4. Key Claim Construction Positions

  • "session": Petitioner proposed construing this term as "a period of time spent communicating between multiple users, such as during communications of e-gaming, multimedia, audio, video, data and game control." This construction is based on the patent's specification.
  • "[negotiating/negotiation] message": Proposed as "a message specifying terms and sent in response to an invitation to participate in a session." Petitioner argued this corresponds to the SIP "OK" message in the prior art, which communicates the second user's capabilities and QoS requirements in response to an INVITE.
  • "latency requirement": Proposed as "a requirement that a certain delay time be less than, equal to, or greater than a specific value." This is based on the specification's discussion of tolerable delay time, such as a latency of less than 50 milliseconds for certain games.

5. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requests the institution of an inter partes review and the cancellation of claims 1-25 and 34-41 of the 6,845,389 patent as unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. §103.