PTAB

IPR2014-01167

Cisco Systems Inc v. Bockstar Technologies LLC

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Petition
petition

1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: Storing Information about a Telephony Session
  • Brief Description: The ’653 patent relates to a system for storing information about a telephony session in a "telephony cookie." The cookie, which may contain user inputs like menu selections or account numbers, is used in a subsequent call to avoid requiring the user to re-enter the same information.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Obviousness over Hanson and Petty - Claims 1-5, 7-13, and 17 are obvious over Hanson in view of Petty.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Hanson (Patent 6,016,336) and Petty (Patent 6,337,858).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Hanson disclosed the core concept of the ’653 patent: an automated voice response system that stores a caller's menu selection from one call and uses that stored information to present a truncated, more direct menu in a subsequent call. This stored "menu option" functions as the claimed "cookie." Petitioner asserted that while Hanson teaches the functional system, Petty supplied the missing packet-based network implementation details. Petty disclosed a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) system where a server creates a cookie containing user preferences and sends it over the internet to a user's client device for storage and later use. The combination of Hanson's call customization logic with Petty's packet-based network and cookie communication protocol allegedly rendered the claims obvious.
    • Motivation to Combine: A Person of Ordinary Skill in the Art (POSITA) would have been motivated to implement Hanson's call management system over a packet-based network, as taught by Petty. Hanson itself stated its invention was not limited to the PSTN and could be used with networks like the Internet. Combining the references represented a simple substitution of a known network environment (Petty's VoIP network) for Hanson's system to achieve the predictable result of operating the call management system over the Internet. Furthermore, using Petty's technique of storing the cookie on the client device was a known design choice to offload storage from the server.
    • Expectation of Success: A POSITA would have reasonably expected success in this combination because implementing telephony services over packet-based networks and using cookies for session management were well-established techniques at the time.

Ground 2: Obviousness over Hanson, Petty, and Ladd - Claim 6 is obvious over Hanson and Petty in view of Ladd.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Hanson (Patent 6,016,336), Petty (Patent 6,337,858), and Ladd (Patent 6,269,336).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: This ground built upon the combination of Hanson and Petty to address the additional limitation of claim 6, which required the cookie to be formatted according to Extensible Markup Language (XML). Petitioner contended that Ladd disclosed using XML to structure and store caller inputs in a voice response system operating over a packet-based network. Ladd taught using an "INPUT element" in an XML script to store data inputted by a user.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would have been motivated to use XML, as taught by Ladd, to format the cookie of the Hanson/Petty system. XML was a well-known, standardized language for structuring data for communication over packet-based networks. Applying it to format the cookie was an obvious design choice to improve the system by providing a standardized, easily parsable format for collecting and storing session information, which would yield predictable benefits.

Ground 3: Obviousness over Hanson, Petty, and Attwater - Claims 14-15 are obvious over Hanson and Petty in view of Attwater.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Hanson (Patent 6,016,336), Petty (Patent 6,337,858), and Attwater (WO 1996/013030).

  • Core Argument for this Ground:

    • Prior Art Mapping: This ground addressed claims 14 and 15, which specifically required the cookie to include "user voice data." While Hanson disclosed using voice commands to navigate menus, Attwater explicitly taught storing the actual speech input (the voice data itself) from a caller. Attwater's system could then retrieve and reprocess this stored voice data later, for instance, to improve speech recognition accuracy after the system had been trained on a particular caller's voice.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would have found it obvious to incorporate Attwater's teaching of storing raw voice data into the cookie of the Hanson/Petty system. Since Hanson already contemplated voice inputs, storing the actual voice data was a known technique to improve similar systems. The motivation was to obtain the predictable benefits disclosed by Attwater, such as improved recognition accuracy and more robust call data logging, by substituting Hanson's storing of a menu selection with Attwater's storing of the speech signals used to make that selection.

  • Additional Grounds: Petitioner asserted an additional obviousness challenge against claim 16 based on Hanson, Petty, and Thornton (WO 1998/000957). This combination argued that Thornton taught storing dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) signal activity from a caller, making it obvious to include such data in the system's cookie.

4. Key Claim Construction Positions

  • "cookie": Petitioner argued that the term "cookie," under the broadest reasonable interpretation, should be construed as "stored information describing a session." Petitioner contended that the patent specification did not require the cookie to be communicated between a client and a server over a network, as is common with internet browser cookies. Instead, the patent's language suggested that a cookie could be created and stored locally on a server. This construction was critical to arguing that the information stored in Hanson's database constituted a "cookie" under the patent's claims.

5. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requested institution of an inter partes review and cancellation of claims 1-17 of the ’653 patent as unpatentable.