PTAB

IPR2018-00344

Comcast Cable Communications, LLC v. PROMPTU SYSTEMS CORPORATION

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1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: System and Method of Voice Recognition Near a Wireline Node of a Network Supporting Cable Television and/or Video Delivery
  • Brief Description: The ’196 patent describes a multi-user voice control system for cable television and video networks. The system's architecture centrally locates a speech recognition processor at or near a "wireline node," such as a cable headend, to process voice commands sent from multiple user sites over the network's back channel.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Obviousness over Murdock in view of Nazarathy or Quigley - Claims 1-2, 4, 12-13, 27-28, 30, and 38-42 are obvious over Murdock in view of Nazarathy or Quigley.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Murdock (Patent 7,013,283), Nazarathy (Patent 6,490,727), and Quigley (Patent 6,650,624).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Murdock discloses the core elements of the challenged claims, including a cable television system where voice commands from multiple users are sent via a back channel to a remote server computer (the "wireline node") for speech recognition. Murdock explicitly teaches multiplexing audio signals from different users for transmission over the back channel. To meet the "partitioning" limitation of the claims, Petitioner contended that a person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA) would have inherently understood that a multiplexed signal must be demultiplexed at the headend to identify individual user commands. Nazarathy and Quigley were cited as providing the explicit teaching of this step, as both describe demultiplexing techniques (e.g., Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) and Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM)) used at a cable headend to separate and process upstream signals from multiple users.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would combine these references because they all operate in the same field of interactive cable television networks. Murdock teaches a system that multiplexes voice commands but is not specific about how those combined signals are separated for processing at the headend. Nazarathy and Quigley provide the well-known, necessary techniques for demultiplexing upstream signals. The combination would be a common-sense implementation to make Murdock’s multi-user system functional and efficient by applying standard channel management techniques.
    • Expectation of Success: Combining the multiplexed system of Murdock with the standard demultiplexing techniques taught by Nazarathy or Quigley represented a simple application of known elements for their intended purposes, leading to predictable results and a high expectation of success.

Ground 2: Obviousness over Julia in view of Nazarathy or Quigley - Claims 1-2, 4, 12-13, 27-28, 30, and 38-42 are obvious over Julia in view of Nazarathy or Quigley.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Julia (Patent 6,513,063), Nazarathy (Patent 6,490,727), and Quigley (Patent 6,650,624).

  • Core Argument for this Ground:

    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner asserted that Julia teaches a system where voice commands from multiple users are sent over a network, which Julia specifies can be a coaxial cable television network, to a remote server for speech processing. Julia explicitly discloses that its system is designed to support requests from "multiple simultaneous network users." Similar to the Murdock argument, Petitioner contended that while Julia anticipates multiple users, it does not detail the mechanism for separating their upstream signals. Nazarathy and Quigley were again used to supply the explicit teaching of "partitioning" the back channel by describing standard industry methods for demultiplexing multiple upstream signals at a cable headend.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would combine Julia with Nazarathy or Quigley to implement Julia’s multi-user system on a standard cable network. The combination directly addresses the challenge of managing simultaneous upstream data from multiple users by applying the well-known and necessary channel management techniques that Nazarathy and Quigley teach. This would be a natural and predictable step in engineering such a system.
    • Expectation of Success: Implementing Julia's voice control system on a cable network using the standard upstream signal management taught by Nazarathy or Quigley would have been a predictable design choice with a high likelihood of success.

  • Additional Grounds: Petitioner asserted further obviousness challenges by combining the primary references (Murdock or Julia) with Banker (Patent 5,477,262) or Gordon (Patent 6,314,573). These combinations were used to argue that dependent claims reciting financial transaction elements (e.g., assessing and billing for pay-per-view or video-on-demand content) were obvious, as Banker and Gordon explicitly teach such user interface and billing systems for cable networks.

4. Key Claim Construction Positions

  • "partitioning said received back channel into a multiplicity of [said] received identified speech channels": Petitioner argued this term, central to its invalidity case, should be construed broadly as "dividing the received back channel into multiple portions that are each identified with speech commands originating from system users." This construction was critical because the primary references (Murdock and Julia) disclose multiplexing signals from multiple users, and Petitioner argued a POSITA would inherently know this requires demultiplexing (the "partitioning") at the receiving end to process individual commands.
  • "wireline node": Petitioner proposed this term be construed as "a network node providing video or cable television delivery to multiple users over physical wires between the node and the multiple user locations." This interpretation encompasses the cable headend or remote server computer disclosed in the prior art references.
  • "back channel": Petitioner construed this term according to its standard industry meaning as an "upstream communication channel delivering signals from multiple user sites to a central wireline node."

5. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requests institution of an inter partes review and cancellation of claims 1-2, 4-6, 12-13, 27-28, 30-32, and 38-42 of Patent 7,047,196 as unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. §103.