Google Inc v. Core Wireless Licensing SARL

1. Case Identification

• Case #: IPR2015-01715
• Patent #: 7,072,667
• Filed: August 11, 2015
• Petitioner(s): Google Inc., LG Electronics, Inc.
• Patent Owner(s): Core Wireless Licensing S.A.R.L.
• Challenged Claims: 1-15

2. Patent Overview

• Title: Location Information Service for a Cellular Telecommunications Network
• Brief Description: The ’667 patent describes providing a location information service for mobile stations in a cellular network without requiring prior registration of the subscriber with the service.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Anticipation of Claims 1-3 and 8-14 under 35 U.S.C. §102

• Prior Art Relied Upon: Staack (PCT Publication No. WO 00/36430).
• Core Argument for this Ground:
  • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued Staack discloses every limitation of the challenged claims. Staack describes a method for estimating the location of a mobile unit in a cellular system where a request is sent from a mobile station to a location server (e.g., a Mobile Locating Unit or MLU). The server then retrieves data corresponding to the location from a data store based on the cell the mobile station occupies and sends the location data back to the requesting mobile station as a message. Petitioner contended that the negative limitation "without pre-registering the mobile station" is met because Staack is silent on any requirement for pre-registration to use the location service. Furthermore, Staack’s disclosure that privacy controls are optional ("preferred") implies that the base system can operate without them, and therefore without pre-registration.

Ground 2: Obviousness of Claims 5, 6, 7, and 15 over Staack in view of Reed

• Prior Art Relied Upon: Staack (WO 00/36430) and Reed (Patent 6,275,707).
• Core Argument for this Ground:
  • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner asserted that while Staack teaches a mobile station requesting the location of another mobile station, it does not explicitly disclose sending location information from the other mobile station to the requester (claim 5) or re-directing messages to another mobile station (claim 6). Reed, however, explicitly discloses a "peer-to-peer mode of operation" for transceivers in a wireless system, enabling the direct transfer of a location estimate from a first transceiver to a second. Petitioner argued that Reed supplies the missing peer-to-peer communication elements.
  • Motivation to Combine: A person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA) would combine Reed's peer-to-peer location sharing capabilities with Staack's cellular-based location service architecture. The motivation would be to provide a more robust system that allows mobile stations to share location information directly, thereby improving the speed, accuracy, and reliability of location determinations.
  • Expectation of Success: A POSITA would have had a reasonable expectation of success because both references operate in the field of wireless and cellular communications. Implementing Reed's known peer-to-peer data transfer functionality within Staack’s established network framework was presented as a predictable modification that would yield the expected benefits.

Ground 3: Obviousness of Claim 4 over Staack in view of Johansson

• Prior Art Relied Upon: Staack (WO 00/36430) and Johansson (Patent 6,442,391).
• Core Argument for this Ground:
  • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that claim 4 adds the step of "checking whether the other mobile station permits data concerning its location to be sent to others." While Staack teaches checking if a requesting station is permitted to receive information (a form of access control), it does not disclose a check based on the target station's permission to send its own data. Johansson was alleged to cure this deficiency by disclosing a system where the user of a target mobile station can set a privacy indicator to a "permission granted state or a permission not-granted state." The system then checks this indicator before divulging the mobile station's location.
  • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would be motivated to incorporate Johansson's user-controlled privacy mechanism into Staack's location service. The primary motivation was the well-understood goal of improving user privacy and control over personal location data, which was a known objective in the art at the time.
  • Expectation of Success: The combination was asserted to be a simple application of a known privacy technique (from Johansson) to an existing system (Staack) to achieve a predictable result. Since both references relate to location-based services in mobile networks, a POSITA would have readily understood how to integrate the privacy check into Staack's architecture with a high expectation of success.

4. Key Claim Construction Positions

• "location message server": Petitioner proposed the broadest reasonable interpretation is "a server that generates location finding information." This construction was argued to be consistent with the claims, which describe the server receiving requests for and sending data corresponding to location information, and the specification's description of a "location messaging server 11" that generates this information.
• "without pre-registering the mobile station...": Petitioner proposed the construction "without recording that a mobile station can take part in a location finding service prior to a request for location finding information." This was based on the plain language requiring the absence of registration prior to the service request and supported by the prosecution history, where the applicant distinguished prior art by emphasizing that claimed functions occur "at the time of the request."
• Means-Plus-Function Terms: Petitioner argued that "circuitry operable to..." limitations in claims 13 and 15 should be treated as means-plus-function terms under §112, para. 6, because they fail to recite sufficiently definite structure. For the purposes of the IPR, Petitioner assumed the corresponding structure, as argued by the Patent Owner in co-pending litigation, is a "mobile station (MS), or equivalents thereof."

5. Relief Requested

• Petitioner requests institution of an inter partes review and cancellation of claims 1-15 of the ’667 patent as unpatentable.