PTAB

IPR2017-01532

FanDuel Inc v. Interactive Games LLC

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Petition
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1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: Gaming System with Location-Based Customization
  • Brief Description: The ’518 patent discloses a gaming system that enables users to participate in gaming activities from remote or mobile electronic devices. The system uses location verification to determine if a user is in a legally permitted area for gaming and maintains user profiles to customize the gaming environment based on user activities, preferences, and location history.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Claims 9 and 12 are obvious over Vuong in view of Harkham and the knowledge of a POSITA.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Vuong (Application # 2003/0003997) and Harkham (Application # 2002/0094869).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Vuong taught the core elements of independent claim 9, including a networked casino management system that supports remote players using electronic devices (e.g., cell phones with GPS), establishes user profiles, and uses location data to determine if gaming is legally permissible. Vuong’s system updates a user profile log file with the player's location when a gaming session begins. However, Petitioner contended Vuong did not explicitly disclose presenting a modified gaming environment based on a user's last played game. Harkham was alleged to supply this missing element by teaching a networked gaming system where the user interface is customized based on stored user information, such as displaying a player's previously played games in prominent positions upon login. For claim 12, Petitioner asserted that it would have been obvious for Vuong's system, which already tracks a user's location for one jurisdiction, to determine and update the user's existence in a plurality of locations as the mobile user moves between them.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would combine Vuong's location-aware gaming system with Harkham's user interface customization to improve the user experience. Personalizing a gaming interface with stored player-tracking data was a well-known technique to increase player satisfaction by enabling users to more easily access their favorite games.
    • Expectation of Success: A POSITA would have a high expectation of success, as implementing Harkham's known user interface features into Vuong's system was a predictable design choice involving standard programming techniques.

Ground 2: Claims 9, 11, and 13 are obvious over Vuong in view of Harkham and LeMay.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Vuong (Application # 2003/0003997), Harkham (Application # 2002/0094869), and LeMay (Patent 7,384,339).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: This ground built upon the combination of Vuong and Harkham for claim 9 and added LeMay to teach the limitations of claims 11 and 13. Claim 11 requires storing a date and time associated with the user's presence at a particular location. Petitioner argued that while Vuong taught storing the location in a log file, it was silent on including a timestamp. LeMay allegedly remedied this by disclosing a networked gaming system that captures extensive game history information, explicitly including "a location, a date, a time" for each gaming session. Claim 13 extends this concept to a "plurality of locations," which Petitioner argued was an obvious application of the combined teachings when a mobile user plays from different locations over time.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would be motivated to add LeMay's date and time stamping to the user location data in the Vuong/Harkham system for common and important purposes like auditing and security. Date and timestamps were an extremely common method of providing temporal information, and their inclusion in a real-time, transaction-based log file like Vuong's was a simple and obvious modification.
    • Expectation of Success: Incorporating well-known date/time stamping methods as taught by LeMay into Vuong's data logging would have been a routine task for a POSITA with a predictable outcome.

Ground 3: Claim 21 is obvious over Koza in view of Harkham.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Koza (WO 01/68207A1) and Harkham (Application # 2002/0094869).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner asserted that Koza, like Vuong, taught the fundamental elements of the challenged independent claim (claim 21, which mirrors claim 9). Koza described a networked gaming system where remote users create profiles and connect to a server. The server determines the user's location via their IP address, maps it to a geographic area using a database, and determines if the user is in a permitted jurisdiction before allowing play. Koza also taught storing a time and IP address (indicative of location) in a log file upon login. As with the primary ground, Petitioner relied on Harkham to teach the element of presenting a modified gaming environment that indicates the user's last gaming activity from a prior session.
    • Motivation to Combine: The motivation was identical to that for combining Vuong and Harkham: to improve the user experience of Koza's system. A POSITA would have been motivated to modify Koza's server to prominently display the last game played, as taught by Harkham, to increase player satisfaction and engagement. This was a known benefit of personalized interfaces in gaming environments.
    • Expectation of Success: Adding Harkham's known interface customization features to Koza's established location-based gaming system would predictably result in an improved, but obvious, system.

4. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requests institution of an inter partes review and cancellation of claims 9, 11-13, and 21 of the ’518 patent as unpatentable.