PTAB

IPR2016-00964

Bungie, Inc. v. Acceleration Bay, LLC

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1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: Broadcast Network with Feedback to Control Data Transmission
  • Brief Description: The ’634 patent describes a method for broadcasting information across a computer network where each participant is connected to a specific number of other participants (neighbors). The patented system uses a "flooding" technique in a "non-routing table based" network configured as a non-complete, "m-regular" graph, meaning each node has exactly 'm' connections, but not all nodes are connected to each other.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Obviousness of Claims 1-18 over Shoubridge

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Shoubridge (Peter J. Shoubridge & Arek Dadej, Hybrid Routing in Dynamic Networks, 1997 IEEE International Conference on Communications).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Shoubridge, a 1997 paper on network routing, discloses the key features of the challenged claims. Shoubridge described modeling a communications network as a graph with nodes and neighbors and analyzed a "flooding" routing protocol. Specifically, it analyzed a 64-node network where each node has a "connectivity of degree 4," which Petitioner asserted is a 4-regular network. Because a 64-node network where each node connects to only 4 others is inherently a non-complete graph, Petitioner contended Shoubridge taught the claimed network topology. Shoubridge's protocol was a form of "constrained flooding" that used sequence numbering to identify and discard duplicate packets, which Petitioner alleged disclosed or rendered obvious the claim limitations related to forwarding data and handling data sequentially.
    • Motivation to Combine: The argument was not a traditional combination of references but an assertion that a person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA) would have been motivated to apply well-known networking principles to the system described in Shoubridge. For limitations not explicitly taught, such as using sequence numbers to reorder out-of-sequence data, Petitioner argued this was a commonplace, well-understood implementation choice for any POSITA working with packet-based networks. The motivation was to use known techniques to achieve their predictable and desired results, such as ensuring reliable data delivery.
    • Expectation of Success: Petitioner asserted a POSITA would have had a high expectation of success because the claimed features beyond Shoubridge's express disclosure, such as using TCP/IP or implementing nodes as computer processes, were standard, routine aspects of network design at the time. Applying these known techniques to Shoubridge's disclosed network topology would have been straightforward.

Ground 2: Anticipation of Claims 10-11, 15, and 18 by Shoubridge

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Shoubridge (Peter J. Shoubridge & Arek Dadej, Hybrid Routing in Dynamic Networks, 1997 IEEE International Conference on Communications).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: For this narrower set of claims, Petitioner argued that Shoubridge disclosed every element, meeting the stricter standard for anticipation under 35 U.S.C. §102. The argument repurposed the evidence from Ground 1, asserting it was sufficient for anticipation.
      • Claim 10 (broadcast channel): Petitioner contended that Shoubridge's disclosure of a flooding protocol over a communications network inherently described a "non-routing table based broadcast channel" where participants (nodes) are peer-to-peer and evenly distributed.
      • Claim 11 (disregard received data): Shoubridge's "constrained flooding" method, which explicitly taught that "Nodes store sequence numbers of packets already flooded" and discard packets that "revisit a node with the same sequence number," was argued to be a direct disclosure of a component that disregards data it has already sent.
      • Claim 15 (participant is a computer): Petitioner argued that a POSITA would have understood Shoubridge's "network nodes," which have "computer processing power and memory requirements," to be computers.
      • Claim 18 (participants are peers): Shoubridge’s model, where user traffic is "evenly distributed across all N nodes," was asserted to directly disclose a network where all participants are peers.

4. Key Claim Construction Positions

  • "m-regular": Petitioner construed this term to mean "each node is connected to exactly m other nodes." This construction was central to mapping the "connectivity of degree 4" network in Shoubridge to the claims.
  • "non-complete graph": Petitioner defined this as a "graph in which at least two nodes are not connected to each other." This construction was critical for arguing that Shoubridge's 64-node, 4-connection network met this limitation, as it is mathematically impossible for such a network to be complete.
  • "m-connected": This was construed to mean that "dividing the network into two or more separate parts would require the removal of at least m nodes." Petitioner argued Shoubridge's 4-regular "torus" network was also 4-connected.

5. Arguments Regarding Discretionary Denial

  • Petitioner filed a motion for joinder with IPR2015-01996, which was previously instituted on nearly identical grounds against the ’634 patent.
  • Petitioner argued that because the present petition was a "practical copy" of grounds the Board had already found to have a reasonable likelihood of success, discretionary denial would be improper. Joinder was presented as an efficient path that avoids inconsistent results and conserves the resources of the parties and the Board, as it relies on the same arguments and expert testimony already under review.

6. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requested that the Board institute an inter partes review and cancel claims 1-18 of the ’634 patent as unpatentable.