PTAB

IPR2015-01734

IBM Corp v. Parallel Networks Licensing LLC

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Petition
petition

1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: System and Method for Managing Dynamic Web Page Generation Requests
  • Brief Description: The ’335 patent is directed to methods and apparatuses for managing Web page requests by routing requests received at a Web server to multiple page servers, thereby freeing the initial Web server to process other requests.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Anticipation of Independent Claims - Claims 30 and 43 are anticipated by SWEB 95.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: SWEB 95 (Andresen et al., "SWEB: Towards A Scalable World Wide Web Server On Multicomputers," 1995).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that SWEB 95, a paper describing a scalable multi-server architecture for handling high-volume web traffic, discloses every limitation of independent claims 30 and 43. SWEB 95's architecture consists of multiple servers (a plurality of page servers) that can each process requests. An incoming request to a first server (the Web server) is intercepted by a "distributed scheduler" which selects the optimal server for processing based on dynamic system load information. The request is then routed to the selected server, freeing (releasing) the initial server to handle other requests while the selected server processes the routed request concurrently. Petitioner further asserted that SWEB 95’s disclosure of executing Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs meets the limitation of "dynamically generating" a web page in response to a request.

Ground 2: Obviousness over SWEB 95 in view of Leaf - Claims 32-33, 36-40, 45-46, 49-53, 69, and 84 are obvious over SWEB 95 in view of Leaf.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: SWEB 95, Leaf (Patent 5,754,772).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner asserted that Leaf, which discloses a system for accessing transaction processing databases via the web, provides the teachings missing from SWEB 95 for several dependent claims. Specifically, Leaf teaches dynamically retrieving data from data sources and transforming it into an HTML document (claims 32, 45). Leaf further teaches using a connection cache to avoid the performance penalty of repeatedly connecting and disconnecting from data sources (claims 33, 46). Finally, Leaf’s method of creating an HTML document by inserting retrieved data into an HTML template was argued to teach the use of "tag-based text templates" (claims 36, 49).
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would combine Leaf with SWEB 95 because both references address the problem of efficiently accessing data sources over the World Wide Web. As using the web for business became more important, a POSITA would have been motivated to incorporate Leaf's known techniques for data access and transaction processing into a scalable server architecture like SWEB 95 to improve its functionality and performance.
    • Expectation of Success: Combining Leaf's data handling and templating features with the SWEB 95 architecture was merely the application of a known technique to a similar system to yield predictable improvements.

Ground 3: Obviousness over SWEB 95 in view of Bradley - Claims 35, 48, 65, and 80 are obvious over SWEB 95 in view of Bradley.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: SWEB 95, Bradley (Bradley et al., "Web-based Access to an Online Atlas of Anatomy...", 1995).

  • Core Argument for this Ground:

    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Bradley, which discloses a web server that uses CGI programs to convert image files on the fly, teaches the caching limitations of certain dependent claims. Bradley explicitly discloses caching the dynamically generated output of CGI programs (the converted GIF files) to avoid repeating the costly conversion process, thus teaching "maintaining a page cache containing said Web page" (claims 35, 48). Petitioner contended that because SWEB 95 already uses computational cost to select a server, it would have been obvious to consider Bradley’s teaching that cache status affects this cost. This combination teaches using information about whether a page is cached to select a page server (claims 65, 80).
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would have been motivated to incorporate Bradley's caching functionality into the SWEB 95 system to achieve the shared goal of improving performance. Caching the output of computationally expensive CGI operations was a well-known and straightforward optimization technique.
    • Expectation of Success: Implementing caching in the SWEB 95 system would have been a direct application of a known technique for its intended purpose, with a high expectation of achieving the predictable result of improved performance.

  • Additional Grounds: Petitioner asserted that claims 30 and 43 are also obvious over SWEB 95 alone. Additional obviousness challenges were asserted for claims 41, 42, 54, and 55 based on combining SWEB 95 with Maltby (Patent 6,202,100) to teach object handling extensions like OLE.

4. Key Claim Construction Positions

  • releasing said [Web server...] to process other requests: Petitioner argued this term’s broadest reasonable interpretation is "freeing said Web server to process other requests." This construction was asserted to be consistent with the specification, which describes how routing a request to a different machine for processing frees the initial web server’s resources to service other client requests.
  • intercepting said request...: Petitioner proposed this term means "to stop or interrupt the handling of said request at the Web server." This was based on the patent’s disclosed embodiment where a request is first received by the server, and its conventional handling is then interrupted by an "interceptor" component that routes the request elsewhere.

5. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requests institution of an inter partes review and cancellation of claims 30, 32, 33, 35-43, 45, 46, 48-55, 65, 69, 80, and 84 of the ’335 patent as unpatentable.