PTAB

IPR2016-01739

Apple Inc v. Realtime Data LLC

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Key Events
Petition
petition

1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: Systems and Methods for Accelerated Loading of Operating Systems and Application Programs
  • Brief Description: The ’862 patent relates to data storage controllers that accelerate computer system boot times. The invention proposes pre-loading portions of an operating system and application programs from a boot device into an on-board cache memory, and optionally using data compression and decompression to further reduce boot time.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Claims 5, 35-46, and 97 are obvious over Settsu

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Settsu (Patent 6,374,353).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Settsu taught nearly all limitations of independent claim 5. Settsu describes a method for reducing boot time by loading compressed operating system ("OS") files from a boot device (first memory) into a system memory (second memory), then decompressing and utilizing the data to boot the system. Petitioner contended this maps to the claim limitations of storing, loading, accessing, decompressing, and utilizing compressed boot data. The primary limitation not explicitly disclosed was "updating the boot data list." However, Petitioner argued that updating was obvious even in view of Settsu alone, as a person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA) would have understood that OS modules require regular updates, which would inherently involve updating the corresponding list of boot files.
    • Motivation to Combine (for §103 grounds): Not applicable as this ground relies on a single reference. The motivation to implement the teachings was to achieve Settsu's stated goal of reducing computer boot time.
    • Expectation of Success (for §103 grounds): A POSITA would have had a high expectation of success in implementing these known techniques for the predictable purpose of faster booting.

Ground 2: Claims 5, 35-46, 97, 98, and 112 are obvious over Settsu in view of Zwiegincew

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Settsu (Patent 6,374,353) and Zwiegincew (Patent 6,317,818).

  • Core Argument for this Ground:

    • Prior Art Mapping: This ground reinforces the arguments made against Settsu and adds Zwiegincew to explicitly teach the "updating the boot data list" limitation, which was added to the claims during prosecution to overcome a rejection based on Settsu. Settsu provides the foundational system for accelerated booting using a list of preloaded, compressed OS files. Zwiegincew addresses the same problem of slow boot times by proposing a system that pre-fetches data pages from a hard disk to memory based on an automatically generated and updated "scenario file." This scenario file, which functions as a boot data list, is dynamically updated based on observed system behavior, such as frequently recurring hard page faults, to ensure the most relevant data is pre-fetched.
    • Motivation to Combine (for §103 grounds): A POSITA would combine Zwiegincew's dynamic updating method with Settsu's preloading architecture to further enhance boot speed. The two references address the same problem with complementary solutions. A POSITA would have been motivated to incorporate Zwiegincew's intelligent, pattern-based list updating into Settsu's static preloading system to make it more efficient and adaptive to changes in system use over time.
    • Expectation of Success (for §103 grounds): Success would have been expected, as combining a dynamic list-management technique with a data preloading system involved applying known principles in the same field of art to achieve a predictable improvement in performance.

  • Additional Grounds: Petitioner asserted further obviousness challenges (Grounds 3 and 4) adding Dye (Patent 6,145,069) to the primary combinations. Dye was cited to reinforce the motivation for using well-known compression/decompression techniques, such as parallel encoders and dictionary-based encoding (e.g., Lempel-Ziv), to further increase data access speeds during the boot process.

4. Key Claim Construction Positions

  • "boot data": Petitioner argued that for the purposes of this inter partes review (IPR), the term "boot data" should be construed broadly to include any data associated with data requests expected to result from a system power-on or reset. This construction is not limited to just OS data but also includes program code for applications and other files that are likely to be requested during startup. This broad interpretation was supported by the patent's specification, which describes preloading "computer operating systems and applications" and other data a user might want at startup. This construction was critical to Petitioner's argument that the prior art's disclosure of preloading various OS modules and application files met the claim limitations.

5. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requests institution of an IPR and cancellation of claims 5, 35-46, 97, 98, and 112 of the ’862 patent as unpatentable.