PTAB

IPR2017-01731

Alphonso Inc v. Free Stream Media Corp

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Key Events
Petition
petition

1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: Targeting With Television Audience Data Across Multiple Screens
  • Brief Description: The ’356 patent describes a system for delivering targeted data (e.g., advertising) to a second-screen client device (e.g., a mobile phone) based on content being displayed on a first-screen networked device (e.g., a smart TV). The system uses a relevancy-matching server to identify the content on the first device and push related data to an application on the second device.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Claims 1, 2, 10, 11, 13-15, and 17-19 are obvious over Davis in view of Delirium.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Davis (Application # 2010/0119208) and Delirium (“Java and Java Virtual Machine Security Vulnerabilities and their Exploitation Techniques,” a 2002 publication).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Davis discloses nearly all limitations of the challenged claims, including a two-screen system where a mobile device captures ambient content from a television, a remote server identifies the content, and related information is returned to the mobile device. Davis, however, does not explicitly disclose running applications within a security sandbox or bypassing its controls. Petitioner asserted that Delirium, a well-known paper on Java security, remedies this by teaching the use of a security sandbox model for applets and describing techniques to bypass sandbox restrictions to enable necessary functionality, such as file system access.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would combine Davis and Delirium to solve the common problem of enabling information sharing between networked devices while maintaining security. Davis describes the functional goal but not the specific security implementation. As mobile devices ubiquitously employed sandboxing, a POSITA implementing Davis’s system would have necessarily confronted sandboxing restrictions and would have been motivated to use known bypass techniques, as taught by Delirium, to create a functional and secure system.
    • Expectation of Success: A POSITA would have a reasonable expectation of success, as combining the known content-delivery architecture of Davis with the standard security and bypass techniques from Delirium was a predictable integration of known elements to achieve a desired, functional system. The petition asserted this was a simple design choice, not an inventive step.

Ground 2: Claims 1, 2, 10, 11, 13-15, and 17-19 are obvious over Davis in view of the state of the art.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Davis (Application # 2010/0119208) and the general state of the art regarding security sandboxing in mobile operating systems.
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: This ground presented a similar argument to Ground 1, with Davis teaching the core system. However, instead of relying specifically on Delirium, Petitioner argued that the remaining limitations—constraining an application in a security sandbox and bypassing its controls—were obvious in light of the general state of the art. By the time of the alleged invention, sandboxing was a fundamental, conventional security feature in all major mobile operating systems like Google's Android and Apple's iOS.
    • Motivation to Combine: The motivation was based on conventional practice and design necessity. A POSITA implementing the mobile device system of Davis would have understood that the application would, by default, operate within a security sandbox. To enable the inter-device communication required by the system, it would have been a matter of common sense and knowledge to implement known methods for bypassing certain sandbox controls, as this was a common and critical practice in mobile application development.
    • Expectation of Success: The combination was argued to be a simple matter of applying common knowledge to a known system. Since sandboxing and its associated bypass techniques were ubiquitous and well-understood, a POSITA would have had a high expectation of success in applying these conventional tools to the Davis framework to yield the predictable result of a functional, secure, cross-screen content delivery application.

4. Key Technical Contentions (Beyond Claim Construction)

  • Priority Date Challenge: A central contention of the petition was that the ’356 patent is not entitled to any priority date earlier than May 28, 2013. Petitioner argued that key limitations recited in all challenged claims, such as a "relevancy-matching server" and the step of "searching a storage for targeted data," were first disclosed and enabled in the ’015 application filed on that date. According to the Petitioner, none of the seven earlier patent applications in the priority chain provided written description support for these crucial elements. This later effective priority date is critical for establishing that Davis (filed in 2008) and Delirium (published in 2002) are valid prior art references against the challenged claims.

5. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requested institution of an inter partes review and cancellation of claims 1, 2, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, and 19 of the ’356 patent as unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. §103.