PTAB

IPR2015-00180

Google Inc v. SimpleAir Inc

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Key Events
Petition
petition

1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: System and Method for Data Transmission and Notification
  • Brief Description: The ’154 patent describes a method for transmitting data from an online information source to remote computing devices. The system involves generating data at an information source, identifying users that have subscribed to receive notifications, and transmitting the data to a central broadcast server which processes it into addressable data blocks and forwards them to receivers associated with the subscribed users.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Obviousness over Yan and Kane - Claims 1-3, 6-8, 24, and 29 are obvious over Yan in view of Kane.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Yan (a 1995 USENIX Technical Conference paper) and Kane (International Publication No. WO 94/08419).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Yan taught a general information dissemination service (the SIFT system) where users subscribe to topics of interest and passively receive filtered information via email from a server. This SIFT server, which receives and processes information from a source like Netnews, was argued to meet the limitations of the claimed central broadcast server. While Yan disclosed the high-level system, Kane was asserted to teach the specific data handling details, describing an electronic mail delivery system for pagers that performs the claimed data block processing. Specifically, Kane’s central terminal taught an information gateway that builds data blocks and assigns addresses from a subscriber database, and a transmission gateway that prepares data for transmission to remote receivers. The combination was alleged to teach sending notifications regardless of whether the remote device was online or offline from a data channel.
    • Motivation to Combine: A Person of Ordinary Skill in the Art (POSA) would combine Kane’s detailed message processing and delivery system with Yan’s information filtering service. The motivation was to use a known, specific delivery mechanism (Kane) to improve a similar, more general system (Yan) that was ready for such an improvement. This combination of known techniques was argued to yield only predictable results.
    • Expectation of Success: A POSA would have had a high expectation of success because combining the known email and paging technologies of Kane with the known information filtering service of Yan involved using standard components and protocols to achieve the predictable result of delivering filtered content to subscribers.

Ground 2: Obviousness over Yan, Kane, and Verkler - Claim 4 is obvious over Yan in view of Kane and in further view of Verkler.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Yan, Kane, and Verkler (Patent 5,850,517).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: This ground built upon the base combination of Yan and Kane. Claim 4 adds the limitation that the wireless transmission utilizes one or more carriers, such as a "cellular carrier." Petitioner asserted that while the Yan/Kane combination taught wireless transmission via a paging channel, Verkler was introduced to explicitly teach the use of a cellular modem over a cellular carrier for wireless data communication.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSA would find it obvious to incorporate the cellular carrier taught by Verkler into the wireless delivery system of Yan/Kane. Petitioner argued this was merely the substitution of one known method of wireless communication (cellular) for another (paging) to achieve the predictable benefits of cellular technology, representing a simple application of a known technique to an existing system.

Ground 3: Obviousness over Yan, Kane, and Reilly - Claims 9, 10, 14-17, 19-21, and 27 are obvious over Yan in view of Kane and in further view of Reilly.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Yan, Kane, and Reilly (Patent 5,740,549).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued the base Yan/Kane combination taught the core system for delivering messages to remote devices. Reilly was added to teach the user interface and content-specific features recited in several dependent claims. Reilly disclosed a system that provided visual alerts (e.g., "headlines") for new information, allowed a user to select an alert to launch a viewer for the full content, displayed contextual graphics, and included advertisements in the transmitted data. These teachings were argued to map directly to the limitations concerning visual alerts, viewers, contextual graphics, and advertisements.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSA would combine the user interface features of Reilly with the Yan/Kane data delivery system to enhance the user experience. This was presented as a predictable integration of known graphical user interface elements with a notification system to improve its functionality.
  • Additional Grounds: Petitioner asserted additional obviousness challenges, including combinations using Olazabal (Patent 5,323,148) to teach audio alerts and PC Magazine (a 1995 article) to teach a dedicated alert panel. A final ground combined Yan, Kane, Verkler, and Reilly to challenge the "catch-all" combination claims 30-34.

4. Key Claim Construction Positions

  • Petitioner argued for adopting several constructions from a related district court litigation involving the parent ’914 patent, given the shared specification.
  • The term "data channel" was proposed to be construed as "one or more communication channels or paths for accessing or viewing... information... over a communications network." This broad construction was central to Petitioner's argument, as it supported the view that prior art paging systems, which deliver notifications without requiring a persistent connection back to the information source, met the claim limitations.
  • The phrase "whether said computing devices are online or offline from a data channel" was construed to mean whether the device is connected to the Internet or another online service at the time the notification is received. This interpretation was critical for applying prior art where a device receives a page (offline) and later connects to retrieve more data (online).
  • For the new term "communicatively coupled," Petitioner proposed a plain meaning construction of "coupled for communication," which would allow the claimed gateways and server to be functions on the same or different physical servers, providing flexibility to map the distributed systems taught in the prior art.

5. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requests institution of an inter partes review and cancellation of claims 1-4, 6-11, 13-17, 19-21, 24, 27, and 29-34 of Patent 8,601,154 as unpatentable.