PTAB

IPR2018-00734

Microsoft Corporation v. IPA Technologies Inc., which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Wi-LAN Technologies Inc., which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Wi-LAN Inc., which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Quarterhill Inc.

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1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: System, Method, and Article of Manufacture for Agent-Based Navigation in a Speech-Based Data Navigation System
  • Brief Description: The ’061 patent discloses a system for navigating electronic data sources using spoken natural language requests. The system employs a platform of distributed software agents managed by a central "facilitator" to process speech input, construct a query, and retrieve information from sources like databases and websites.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Anticipation under 35 U.S.C. §102 - Claims 1-18 are anticipated by Moran.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Moran et al., Multimodal User Interfaces in the Open Agent Architecture (1997) (“Moran”).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Moran, a printed publication available more than a year before the ’061 patent’s filing date, discloses every element of the challenged claims. Moran described an agent-based system using the same Open Agent Architecture (OAA) recited in the ’061 patent. This system received multimodal user input, including spoken commands, used a speech recognition agent and natural language understanding agent to interpret the request, constructed a logical representation of the query, and employed a central "Facilitator" agent to route tasks to appropriate application agents (e.g., database agents) to retrieve the requested information. This process directly maps to the method, system, and computer-readable medium claims of the ’061 patent.
    • Key Aspects: Petitioner emphasized that two of the four named inventors on the ’061 patent were also authors of the Moran reference, suggesting Moran described the very subject matter later claimed in the patent.

Ground 2: Obviousness over Moran in view of Kistler - Claims 1-18 (specifically addressing claim 6) are obvious over Moran in view of Kistler.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Moran (1997 publication) and Kistler and Marais, WebL – a programming language for the Web (1998) (“Kistler”).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner asserted this ground as an alternative, arguing that to the extent Moran was found not to explicitly teach every limitation, the combination with Kistler would render the claims obvious. Specifically for claim 6, which requires an agent that "scrapes the web page," Kistler expressly taught a programming language (WebL) designed for web document processing, including "structured text search on web pages" and extracting data from them. Petitioner argued a person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA) would have understood this as teaching web scraping.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would combine Kistler's web scraping techniques with Moran's agent-based framework to enable the system to retrieve information from unstructured web sources, a known data source mentioned by Moran. Moran’s disclosure of a flexible, "mix-and-match" OAA platform explicitly encouraged incorporating pre-existing components and agents to expand system functionality, providing a clear motivation to integrate Kistler's well-defined web access methods.
    • Expectation of Success: A POSITA would have a reasonable expectation of success because Moran's architecture was specifically designed to facilitate the integration of different, independently developed agents to handle various data retrieval tasks.

Ground 3: Obviousness over Moran in view of Burns - Claims 1-18 are obvious over Moran in view of Burns, with or without Kistler.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Moran (1997 publication), Burns (Patent 5,454,106), and optionally Kistler.
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: This ground was presented in the event Moran was deemed to lack sufficient detail on the specific step of "constructing a navigation query" from an interpreted spoken request. Petitioner argued Burns, which discloses a database retrieval system using natural language, explicitly taught this step. Burns described a system that takes spoken input, tokenizes and parses it, and converts the parsed results into a structured database query to retrieve information. This teaching from Burns supplies any detail on query construction potentially missing from Moran.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would be motivated to integrate the established and detailed query construction methods of Burns into the more advanced, multimodal, and distributed agent architecture of Moran. Both references address the same problem of natural language information retrieval. Combining them represented a predictable path to enhancing Moran's system with robust, known techniques for database interaction, which aligns with Moran's "mix-and-match" design philosophy of incorporating useful, pre-existing components.
    • Expectation of Success: A POSITA would have reasonably expected success in this combination, as it involved applying a known query construction technique (from Burns) within an agent framework (from Moran) designed to manage and delegate such tasks.

4. Key Claim Construction Positions

  • Petitioner stated that for the IPR proceeding, it would adopt the claim constructions previously proposed by the Patent Owner in related district court litigation, arguing the prior art rendered the claims unpatentable even under those constructions. Key terms included:
  • "navigation query": Construed as "an electronic query, form, series of menu selections, or the like; being structured appropriately so as to navigate a particular data source of interest in search of desired information."
  • "constructing a navigation query...": Construed as "combining or arranging elements of (at least part of) the navigation query based upon the interpretation."
  • Petitioner's strategy was to demonstrate unpatentability without creating a dispute over the meaning of the claim terms, leveraging the Patent Owner's own definitions.

5. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requested the institution of an inter partes review and the cancellation of claims 1-18 of Patent 6,523,061 as unpatentable.