PTAB

IPR2016-00701

WTS Paradigm LLC v. EdgeAQ LLC

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Petition
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1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: Method for Automatically Generating Product Data
  • Brief Description: The ’802 patent describes a method for automatically generating descriptive data for a new product. The method involves comparing an image of the new product to a database of pre-existing product images to find a match and then extracting associated data, such as category and attributes, from the matched product record.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Claims 1-20 are obvious over Melcher in view of Musgrove and Gokturk.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Melcher (Application # 2010/0217684), Musgrove (Patent 7,082,426), and Gokturk (Patent 7,660,468).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Melcher discloses the core method of the challenged claims: using image matching against a catalog of items to identify similar products, retrieve associated attribute information, and use that information to pre-populate a template for a new product listing. Melcher also taught using matching criteria like color histograms and allowing a user to narrow searches by category. Petitioner contended that to the extent Melcher’s product catalog did not explicitly comprise a formal "taxonomy" and "ontology" as claimed, Musgrove supplied this teaching. Musgrove described creating and updating a product database by organizing product information, including attributes both relevant and irrelevant to appearance (e.g., physical dimensions and storage capacity), into a formal taxonomy. Finally, Petitioner asserted that Gokturk taught enhancing an image-based search system by allowing a user to select and adjust specific visual matching criteria, such as color, shape, or texture, to refine search results. The combination of these references, Petitioner argued, rendered every limitation of the challenged claims obvious.
    • Motivation to Combine: A Person of Ordinary Skill in the Art (POSA) would combine Musgrove with Melcher to improve the organization and efficiency of Melcher’s product catalog. Using a structured taxonomy and ontology, as taught by Musgrove, was a well-known method for facilitating the extraction and aggregation of product information. A POSA would have been further motivated to incorporate Gokturk's teachings into the Melcher/Musgrove system to improve the user experience and the accuracy of the image matching process. Gokturk explicitly addressed the problem of variability in content-based image searching by providing user-feedback mechanisms to specify desired visual characteristics, which would have been a logical and desirable improvement to Melcher's system.
    • Expectation of Success: A POSA would have had a reasonable expectation of success in combining the references. The proposed combination involved applying known database organization principles (Musgrove) and known user-interface improvements for image searching (Gokturk) to a known image-based product data generation system (Melcher). Each element would have performed its expected function, leading to a predictable result.

4. Key Claim Construction Positions

  • "taxonomy": Petitioner proposed this term means "a hierarchy of things in which those things are categorized into groups and subgroups." This construction was important to argue that Melcher's disclosure of organizing products by "category" and "subcategory" met the limitation.
  • "ontology": Petitioner proposed this term means "the association of attributes and attribute values with products at a particular node in a taxonomy." This construction supported the argument that Melcher’s teaching of associating multiple attributes with items in each category constituted an ontology.
  • "matching criterion selected in whole or in part by a user": Petitioner proposed this phrase means "any search criterion, including an image characteristic—such as color, shape and texture—or category limitation." This broad construction was used to map teachings from both Melcher (category selection) and Gokturk (visual characteristic selection) to the claims.

5. Key Technical Contentions (Beyond Claim Construction)

  • Two-Step Search for Robustness: Petitioner highlighted that the ’802 patent itself suggests that performing two searches—a first search to identify a product category (node) and a second, narrower search within that category—makes the "automatic generation of attributes...more robust." Petitioner argued that it would have been obvious for a POSA to modify Melcher's single-search system to perform such a two-step process to achieve this known benefit. This modification would directly lead to the methods described in dependent claim 3 and independent claim 19, which recite an initial search to find a node followed by a second search for products indexed at that node.

6. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requests institution of an inter partes review and cancellation of claims 1-20 of the ’802 patent as unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. §103.