PTAB

IPR2019-00293

Comcast Cable Communications, LLC v. Veveo, Inc.

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1. Case Identification

  • Case #: IPR2019-00293
  • Patent #: 7,937,394
  • Filed: November 12, 2018
  • Petitioner(s): Comcast Cable Communications, LLC
  • Patent Owner(s): Veveo, Inc.
  • Challenged Claims: 1-11

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: Method and System for Dynamically Processing Ambiguous, Reduced Text Search Queries and Highlighting Results Thereof
  • Brief Description: The ’394 patent discloses a method for processing ambiguous search queries entered on a device with overloaded keys, such as a multi-tap phone keypad. The system incrementally identifies and displays matching items from an index and highlights the specific characters in the results that correspond to the user's keystrokes.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Claims 1-11 are obvious over Venkataraman in view of Samuelson.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Venkataraman (Application # 2007/0050337) and Samuelson (Application # 2007/0156747).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Venkataraman, being the parent application of the ’394 patent, teaches most of the claimed elements, including indexing items, receiving ambiguous queries from an overloaded keypad, and incrementally displaying results. However, Petitioner contended that Venkataraman fails to disclose the specific limitations of "determining which letters and numbers...caused the items to be associated" (limitation 1[b]) and then highlighting those specific characters (limitation 1[e]). Samuelson was asserted to teach these missing elements through its "next word" feature. Samuelson's system determines the specific character "stem" (e.g., "RED") that corresponds to an ambiguous numeric input (e.g., "733") to allow a user to reorder results, thereby performing the claimed "determining" step. Highlighting these determined stems would be an obvious implementation of the claimed highlighting step.
    • Motivation to Combine: A Person of Ordinary Skill in the Art (POSITA) would combine Samuelson’s "next word" feature with Venkataraman’s search system to improve usability. This combination would allow users to more efficiently resolve the ambiguity inherent in overloaded keypads and find desired results more quickly.
    • Expectation of Success: Petitioner asserted a high expectation of success, as both Venkataraman and Samuelson disclose similar search systems for overloaded keypads. Integrating Samuelson's disambiguation feature into Venkataraman's framework would have been a straightforward software modification with predictable and beneficial results.

Ground 2: Claim 3 is obvious over Venkataraman in view of Samuelson and Sanders.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Venkataraman (Application # 2007/0050337), Samuelson (Application # 2007/0156747), and Sanders (Patent # 7,885,963).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: This ground was presented as an alternative for claim 3, which requires ordering results such that "term matches" are displayed before "abbreviation matches." If the combination of Venkataraman and Samuelson was found not to teach this specific ordering, Petitioner argued that Sanders supplied the missing element. Sanders discloses a search system that uses stemming (e.g., "divine" to "divin") to find "abbreviation matches" and explicitly teaches ranking these less-relevant stemmed matches below exact "term matches."
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would be motivated to incorporate the ranking and stemming techniques from Sanders into the base system of Venkataraman and Samuelson. This would be a recognized method for improving search quality by prioritizing more relevant results and de-prioritizing potentially irrelevant results generated through query expansion techniques like stemming.
    • Expectation of Success: Combining known search refinement techniques like relevance ranking from Sanders with an incremental search system was a well-known practice. As all three references are directed to search systems, adapting the techniques would be straightforward for a POSITA, leading to the predictable result of improved search ordering with a high expectation of success.

4. Key Claim Construction Positions

  • "letters and numbers": Petitioner argued this phrase should be construed as "alphanumeric characters." This construction aligns with the term "alphanumeric" used in the specification and avoids an overly narrow interpretation that would require every item's description to contain both letters and numbers.
  • "directly mapped": Petitioner proposed construing this term consistent with a construction adopted by the PTAB in a prior IPR for the related ’696 patent. The proposed construction was "each alphanumeric character of a search query prefix substring associated with an item is matched with its corresponding numeric key equivalent on an overloaded keypad."
  • "caused the items to be associated...": Petitioner argued this limitation should be construed as "determining the characters that 'match a string of unresolved keystrokes directly mapped to the subset'." This clarifies that the "determining" step is the specific identification of the character-to-keystroke match, a crucial point for the mapping of Samuelson's "stem" determination.

5. Key Technical Contentions (Beyond Claim Construction)

  • A central contention of the petition was that the ’394 patent is not entitled to its claimed 2005 priority date and its effective filing date is August 2, 2010.
  • Petitioner argued that the priority applications lacked sufficient written description support for the "determining" limitation (1[b]) and the corresponding "highlighting" limitation (1[e]). The priority documents were alleged to describe only general highlighting of characters that match a query. They purportedly failed to disclose the specific, two-step claimed process: first "determining" which precise characters "caused" the association with the keystrokes, and then specifically highlighting only those determined characters.
  • This argument was critical because establishing a later priority date allows Venkataraman (the 2007 publication of the parent application) to qualify as prior art under pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. §102(b), which is the foundation of both invalidity grounds.

6. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requested that the Board institute an inter partes review of claims 1-11 of the ’394 patent and cancel those claims as unpatentable.