PTAB

IPR2015-01355

CaptionCall LLC v. Ultratec Inc

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Petition
petition

1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: Personal Interpreter
  • Brief Description: The ’116 patent discloses a portable voice-to-text transcription device, or "personal interpreter," for facilitating communication between a hearing person and a deaf or hard-of-hearing person who are in the same physical location. The device captures local speech, transmits it over a telephone line to a remote relay center for transcription, and then receives and displays the resulting text for the user.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Claims 1-3, 5, 9, 10, and 18 are obvious over Liebermann in view of Aronow.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Liebermann (Patent 5,982,853) and Aronow (Patent 5,521,960).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Liebermann discloses a "communicator" for the deaf that meets nearly all limitations of the independent claims. Liebermann’s device captures proximate speech via a microphone, sends it to a remote processing "center" over a telephone line, and displays the received transcribed text on an LCD screen. Aronow, which discloses a similar assistive relay communication device, was cited for its explicit teaching of two elements not expressly detailed in Liebermann: a microprocessor for controlling all device functions and a simple, user-operable initiation switch to activate the device and connect to the relay service.
    • Motivation to Combine: A Person of Ordinary Skill in the Art (POSITA) would combine the teachings of Aronow with Liebermann’s communicator to improve its functionality and usability. The motivation was to incorporate Aronow's "simple, easy to operate" design—specifically its single-button activation and microprocessor control—into Liebermann's device. This represents a known technique of improving a similar device to make it more automated and accessible, particularly for users unfamiliar with complex protocols.
    • Expectation of Success: Combining these elements was argued to be a predictable integration of well-understood components into an existing device architecture. A POSITA would have a high expectation of success in adding a microprocessor and initiation switch to Liebermann’s communicator to yield the predictable result of a more user-friendly transcription device.

Ground 2: Claims 4, 6, 11-13, and 15 are obvious over Liebermann, Aronow, and O’Toole.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Liebermann (Patent 5,982,853), Aronow (Patent 5,521,960), and O’Toole (Patent 5,889,856).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: This ground builds upon the combination of Liebermann and Aronow and adds O’Toole to address claim limitations requiring a filter to prevent digital communication frequencies from being audibly broadcast over the device's speaker. O’Toole discloses Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology that uses frequency-division multiplexing to transmit voice and data over a single line. Critically, O’Toole teaches using filters (e.g., a low-pass filter for voice) to separate the low-frequency voice signals from the high-frequency data signals, thereby preventing data tones from interfering with the audio output.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA building the Liebermann/Aronow communicator would recognize the known and distracting problem of audible data tones being played over the speaker. To solve this, the POSITA would be motivated to incorporate O'Toole's well-known filtering solution. This would be a mere substitution of a standard telephone connection with O'Toole's established filtered DSL connection scheme to achieve the known benefit of clear audio.
    • Expectation of Success: Integrating a standard DSL filter to separate voice and data was a routine and predictable solution for a POSITA at the time. The result—a communicator where data signals are not broadcast over the speaker—was entirely expected.

Ground 3: Claims 7 and 8 are obvious over Liebermann, Aronow, and McLaughlin.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Liebermann (Patent 5,982,853), Aronow (Patent 5,521,960), and McLaughlin (Patent 6,181,736).

  • Core Argument for this Ground:

    • Prior Art Mapping: This ground adds McLaughlin to the base combination to address claims directed to specific voice-and-data transmission architectures. Claim 8 recites using two separate telephone lines (one for voice, one for text). Claim 7 recites sampling and digitizing voice and combining it with digital text for transmission over a single line. McLaughlin discloses both of these as alternative solutions for relay communications. McLaughlin’s "2-line VCO" technique sends voice and text over separate Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) lines. McLaughlin also teaches that if Simultaneous Voice and Data (SVD) modems are available, voice can be digitized and combined with text for single-line transmission.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would be motivated to utilize McLaughlin's known transmission solutions to address the challenge of sending both voice and data between the communicator and a relay. The choice between McLaughlin's two-line or single-line SVD modem approach would be a simple design choice based on the capabilities of the relay service. If a relay did not support SVD, the two-line method would be used; if it did, the more efficient single-line method would be implemented.
    • Expectation of Success: Applying either of McLaughlin's established and alternative transmission schemes to the Liebermann/Aronow device was a predictable engineering decision with a high expectation of success, as these were known solutions to a common problem in the field.

  • Additional Grounds: Petitioner asserted an additional obviousness challenge against claims 14, 16, and 17 based on the combination of Liebermann, Aronow, and Engelke ’405 (Patent 5,724,405). This ground relied on Engelke's disclosure of specific notch filters designed for text-enhanced telephones to prevent audible data tones, presenting a similar filtering-based argument as Ground 2.

4. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requests institution of an inter partes review and cancellation of claims 1-18 of Patent 5,974,116 as unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. §103.