PTAB

IPR2018-01622

Facebook Inc v. Search Social Media Partners LLC

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1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: Social News Gathering, Prioritizing, Tagging, Searching and Syndication
  • Brief Description: The ’176 patent describes a computer-implemented system for facilitating electronic transactions and interactions over the internet. The core technology involves gathering user-submitted content, determining community approval for that content, associating items with different statuses based on this approval, and syndicating the content in formats like newsfeeds.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Obviousness over Bezos and Pasquali - Claims 1, 6, 14, 21, and 27 are obvious over Bezos in view of Pasquali.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Bezos (Patent 7,433,832), Pasquali (Patent 6,272,493).

  • Core Argument for this Ground:

    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Bezos, which describes the features of the Amazon.com e-commerce website, taught nearly all the core limitations of the challenged claims. Bezos disclosed a system that receives user information to create accounts, accepts user-submitted content (product reviews), and allows a community of users to provide approval or disapproval information (voting reviews as "helpful"). Bezos further taught determining measures of community approval by counting these votes, comparing measures of approval (e.g., helpful vs. unhelpful votes to create a score), and associating content with a status based on the outcome (e.g., ranking a review for display or filtering it out). The system also disclosed associating a user with a different status (e.g., "Top 50 Reviewer") based on the collective approval of their reviews. Petitioner asserted that Bezos taught all claimed features except for providing the user-generated content via a "real-time newsfeed or ticker."

    To supply this missing element, Petitioner relied on Pasquali. Pasquali disclosed methods for displaying dynamically updating content within a portion of a standard web page, which it termed a "window object" or "window module." Pasquali explicitly taught that this module could be updated in real-time without user intervention (i.e., without a full page refresh) and could be used to display dynamic content from feeds, such as a "news feed" or a "stock ticker feed." Petitioner contended that implementing the review feed from "favorite people" disclosed in Bezos using the real-time window module taught by Pasquali would result in the claimed invention.

    • Motivation to Combine: Petitioner argued a person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA) would have been motivated to combine the teachings of Bezos and Pasquali to improve the user experience of the Bezos system. Pasquali's technology was presented as a generic, "bolt-on" tool to solve the common problem of static web pages requiring manual refreshes to display new information. A POSITA would combine Pasquali's real-time feed with Bezos's review system to provide users with more timely and relevant information about new product reviews from their community or "favorite people." This would enhance the value of the information and eliminate the frustrating user experience of repeatedly refreshing a page to check for updates.

    • Expectation of Success: A POSITA would have had a reasonable expectation of success in making this combination. Both references described analogous, web-based systems, and implementing Pasquali's well-understood methods for dynamic content display into Bezos's existing web page structure was argued to be a straightforward and predictable integration.

4. Key Claim Construction Positions

  • "Real-Time" Limitations: Petitioner dedicated significant argument to the construction of "real-time," which appeared in all challenged claims in phrases like "real-time newsfeed or ticker." Petitioner argued that under its broadest reasonable interpretation, the term as used in the ’176 patent specification described content that was "current or up-to-date." This construction focused on the freshness of the information itself, not necessarily the timing or immediacy of its delivery to the user. Petitioner asserted that under this construction, the prior art met the limitation. However, Petitioner also argued in the alternative that even if "real-time" were construed more narrowly to require immediate, automatic delivery, the combination of Bezos with Pasquali (which explicitly taught continuously updated feeds) would render the claims obvious.

5. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requests institution of an inter partes review (IPR) for claims 1, 6, 14, 21, and 27, and a final determination that these claims are unpatentable.