PTAB

IPR2015-00464

Clickboothcom LLC v. Essociate Inc

Key Events

Petition

petition

Title: Targeted Advertising Using A Personal Data Network
Brief Description: The ’660 patent describes a method and system for delivering targeted advertisements while preserving user privacy. The system utilizes a "personal data network" stored on a user's local computer, which contains the user's personal data and preferences. Instead of sending personal data to a central server, the system sends targeting information to the user's computer, where the matching of ads to the user's profile occurs locally.

Prior Art Relied Upon: Lang (Patent 5,991,735)
Core Argument for this Ground:
- Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Lang disclosed every limitation of the challenged claims. Lang teaches a "personal preference agent" that resides and operates on a user's client computer to shield the user's identity and preferences. This agent stores user profile data locally (the claimed "personal data network"), receives information such as news articles or advertisements from external sources (the claimed "targeting information"), and filters this information based on the locally stored profile to present only relevant content to the user. This local filtering process directly maps to the ’660 patent's limitation of comparing targeting information to the personal data network to determine a match. Dependent claims relating to updating the profile and specific types of data were also argued to be disclosed by Lang's description of a dynamically updated preference profile based on user behavior.

Prior Art Relied Upon: Lang (Patent 5,991,735), Dean (Patent 5,740,549)
Core Argument for this Ground:
- Prior Art Mapping: Lang provides the foundational architecture of a client-side agent for locally storing user profiles and filtering incoming content to protect user privacy. Petitioner contended that to the extent Lang was found not to explicitly disclose certain targeting mechanisms, Dean supplied these missing elements. Dean teaches a system for creating detailed user profiles by monitoring web browsing history and using these profiles to select targeted banner advertisements.
- Motivation to Combine: A person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA) would combine Dean’s sophisticated user profiling techniques with Lang’s privacy-preserving architecture to create a more effective and commercially robust targeted advertising system. The combination would leverage Dean's powerful method for generating accurate user profiles while incorporating Lang's client-side processing to alleviate privacy concerns, a known issue in the field. This would result in a system with higher targeting accuracy than Lang and better privacy than Dean.
- Expectation of Success: A POSITA would have a clear expectation of success in this combination, as it involved applying Dean's known data collection and profiling algorithms within the well-understood client-server framework taught by Lang. The integration was a matter of routine software engineering.

Prior Art Relied Upon: Dean (Patent 5,740,549)
Core Argument for this Ground:
- Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner asserted that Dean, standing alone, anticipated the challenged claims. Dean discloses a system that monitors a user's navigation of network sites to create a profile of user interests, which can be stored locally on the user's computer. This locally stored profile (the "personal data network") is then used to select targeted information, such as advertisements, for display to the user. Petitioner argued that Dean's disclosure of local profile storage and its use for selecting targeted content met all limitations of independent claim 1, and that further disclosures in Dean taught the limitations of the challenged dependent claims.

"personal data network": Petitioner argued this term should be construed broadly as "a collection of personal data about a user stored on the user's computer." This construction would encompass the "personal preference agent" of Lang and the "user profile" of Dean, which are described as being stored on a client device. Petitioner contended that the patent specification did not require any particular structure beyond the local storage of user data for targeting purposes.
"targeting information": Petitioner proposed this term be construed as "information used to select an ad for a user," distinct from the advertisement itself. This construction was crucial for mapping prior art that described sending selection criteria or content categories to the client, which would then be used to match against the local profile to select a pre-loaded or generic ad.

The central technical contention was that the prior art's concept of a client-side agent or locally stored user profile was functionally and structurally equivalent to the ’660 patent's "personal data network." Petitioner argued that the claimed invention's purported novelty was merely a semantic rebranding of a well-known client-side data processing model for maintaining user privacy in online advertising, as explicitly taught by references like Lang and Dean. The petition emphasized that performing targeting logic on the client-side, using locally stored data, was a known design choice to solve the exact privacy problems the ’660 patent claimed to address.

Petitioner requests institution of an inter partes review (IPR) and cancellation of claims 1-4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, and 26-29 of the ’660 patent as unpatentable.