PTAB

IPR2017-00160

United States v. EnvisionIT LLC

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Key Events
Petition
petition

1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: Message Broadcasting Admission Control System and Method
  • Brief Description: The ’221 patent relates to location-specific message broadcast systems, specifically describing an aggregator and gateway for controlling the admission and delivery of broadcast messages to a geographically defined target area.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Obviousness over Gundlegård, 3GPP, Sandhu, Rieger, and Zimmers - Claim 19 is obvious over Gundlegård in view of 3GPP, Sandhu, Rieger, and Zimmers.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Gundlegård (a 2003 master's thesis), 3GPP Standard (a telecommunications standard), Sandhu (a 1994 IEEE article), Rieger (Application # 2002/0103892), and Zimmers (Patent 6,816,878).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner asserted that Gundlegård, a thesis on cell broadcast services, provided the foundational method for public service broadcast messaging to a target area. Petitioner argued the remaining limitations of claim 19 were disclosed by the secondary references. Specifically, Rieger and Sandhu taught storing a geographically defined jurisdiction for a broadcasting agent, a feature not expressly found in Gundlegård. The combination of Rieger, Zimmers, and Sandhu was alleged to teach the step of verifying an agent’s authority by comparing the requested broadcast area with the agent's stored jurisdiction.
    • Motivation to Combine: Petitioner presented three primary motivations. First, a person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA) would combine Gundlegård with the 3GPP Standard because Gundlegård explicitly cites and is based upon the standard, making it a natural choice for implementation. Second, a POSITA would combine Gundlegård with Sandhu because Gundlegård’s proposed business models require cost allocation, which necessitates the well-known access control, authorization, and auditing schemes taught by Sandhu. Third, a POSITA would combine the system with Rieger and Zimmers to address safety and commercial needs, using Zimmers to limit broadcast scope to avoid "cry wolf" syndrome and Rieger to implement geographic and category-based restrictions for commercial purposes.
    • Expectation of Success: Petitioner contended a POSITA would have had a reasonable expectation of success because combining these elements represented the predictable use of well-known security, authorization, and network standard techniques to improve a known system.

Ground 2: Obviousness over Mani, 3GPP, Sandhu, Rieger, and Zimmers - Claim 19 is obvious over Mani in view of 3GPP, Sandhu, Rieger, and Zimmers.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Mani (Application # 2002/0184346), 3GPP Standard, Sandhu, Rieger, and Zimmers.
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Mani, which discloses an emergency notification service in a next-generation network, provided an alternative foundational system for broadcasting messages to a target area. As in Ground 1, Petitioner relied on the same secondary references to supply the elements allegedly missing from the primary reference. Rieger and Sandhu were asserted to teach storing broadcasting permissions and geographic jurisdictions, while the combination of Rieger, Zimmers, and Sandhu was used to show the verification of an agent’s authority against those stored permissions.
    • Motivation to Combine: The motivations were parallel to those in Ground 1. First, a POSITA implementing Mani’s system, which utilizes a Public Land Mobile Network (PLMN), would be motivated to use the 3GPP Standard to enable cell broadcast functionality, especially across multiple networks. Second, because Mani teaches different user privilege levels but not their implementation, a POSITA would predictably turn to the fundamental authorization and auditing concepts in Sandhu. Third, a POSITA would incorporate the teachings of Rieger and Zimmers for the same safety and commercial reasons as in Ground 1—to restrict the geographic scope of emergency alerts to their proper target audience.
    • Expectation of Success: Petitioner argued a POSITA would have expected success in this combination, as it involved applying known and established techniques for user authorization and geographic targeting to solve common problems in broadcast messaging systems.

4. Key Claim Construction Positions

  • "broadcast": Petitioner argued for the construction: “to transmit data for purposes of wide dissemination over a communications network including, but not limited to, cellular carriers, digital private radio systems, private radio systems, internet, wireline telecommunications, satellite, and CATV systems.” Petitioner contended this construction was directly supported by the ’221 patent’s specification, which lists these exact network types. The broad scope of this term was central to Petitioner's argument that the claimed method was generic and well-disclosed in the prior art.

5. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requests institution of an inter partes review and cancellation of claim 19 of the ’221 patent as unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. §103.