Comcast Cable Communications LLC v. Rovi Guides Inc

1. Case Identification

• Case #: IPR2019-00556
• Patent #: 9,668,014
• Filed: January 10, 2019
• Petitioner(s): Comcast Cable Communications, LLC
• Patent Owner(s): Rovi Guides, Inc.
• Challenged Claims: 1-20

2. Patent Overview

• Title: Systems and Methods for Identifying and Storing a Portion of a Media Asset
• Brief Description: The ’014 patent describes systems for resolving user voice commands to identify, play, and store media assets. The technology focuses on situations where a voice command does not exactly match a known media asset identifier, requiring the system to calculate a "degree of similarity" to find and suggest the intended asset.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Obviousness over Chang and Cho

Claims 1, 4, 7-8, 11, 14, 17-18 are obvious over Chang in view of Cho.

• Prior Art Relied Upon: Chang (Application # 2011/0119715) and Cho (Patent 7,526,506).
• Core Argument for this Ground:
  • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Chang taught all elements of independent claims 1 and 11 except for the specific method of "calculating a degree of similarity." Chang disclosed a media guidance system that receives voice commands (e.g., "Minor Report" instead of "Minority Report"), searches an electronic program guide (EPG), determines if there is an exact match, and if not, identifies similar titles based on criteria like the number of syllables. However, Chang's method of calculating similarity was described as open-ended. Cho was argued to supply the missing element by teaching a specific, well-known fuzzy string matching algorithm (the Levenshtein distance) to calculate a similarity score between strings (e.g., sports schedule data and EPG data) and identify matches that exceed a certain threshold.
  • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA looking to implement Chang's system would have been motivated to use a known and effective algorithm for its similarity calculation. Petitioner asserted that since Chang's method was open-ended ("number of syllables, correspondence of first occurring syllables, etc."), a POSITA would combine it with Cho's specific Levenshtein distance algorithm to improve the performance and reliability of the search function, enabling the system to rank closely-matching titles and filter out non-relevant results.
  • Expectation of Success: A POSITA would have had a high expectation of success because both Chang and Cho described software-based systems operating on similar EPG data with similar hardware (processors and memory). Implementing Cho's well-known Levenshtein algorithm, for which software routines were readily available, into Chang's system was argued to be a straightforward and predictable integration.

Ground 2: Obviousness over Chang, Cho, Jurafsky, and Wang

Claims 3 and 13 are obvious over the combination.

• Prior Art Relied Upon: Chang (Application # 2011/0119715), Cho (Patent 7,526,506), Jurafsky (a 2000 textbook on speech and language processing), and Wang (a 2007 programming textbook).
• Core Argument for this Ground:
  • Prior Art Mapping: This ground built upon the Chang and Cho combination to address the specific "degree of similarity" calculation in claims 3 and 13, which is based on counting matching words rather than characters. Petitioner contended that while the primary combination relied on Cho's character-based Levenshtein distance, a POSITA would also have found it obvious to use a word-based method. Jurafsky taught a well-known "vector-space model" (or "bag of words") for information retrieval, where similarity is calculated by summing the number of common words between two strings. This method was argued to be mathematically equivalent to the embodiment described in the ’014 patent. Wang was cited for the common programming practice of initializing a variable to a default value (e.g., zero) before performing calculations, addressing the "initializing" step of the claims.
  • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would substitute Cho's algorithm with Jurafsky's vector-space model as an improvement because it was known to be simpler, faster, and require less memory. For the "initializing" step, Wang's teaching represented a fundamental programming technique to ensure predictable results and reduce computational complexity, which a POSITA would have routinely implemented.

Ground 3: Obviousness over Chang, Cho, and Hamano

Claims 5, 9, 15, and 19 are obvious over the combination.

• Prior Art Relied Upon: Chang (Application # 2011/0119715), Cho (Patent 7,526,506), and Hamano (Application # 2010/0333137).

• Core Argument for this Ground:

  • Prior Art Mapping: This ground added Hamano to the base combination to teach limitations related to using user profiles and device identifiers. Claims 5 and 15 require selecting a media asset based on a user preference stored in a user profile. Claims 9 and 19 require detecting a device identifier in the voice command and storing the media asset on the identified device. Hamano taught an improved media guidance system that generates recommendations based on both search criteria and user preferences stored in a profile (e.g., genre preference by time of day). Hamano also disclosed using device identifiers (e.g., "TV living room") in voice commands to tailor playback and recording to specific devices based on their accessibility and connectivity, as stored in a user profile.
  • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would combine Hamano's teachings with the Chang-Cho system to improve it. Both systems were similar media guidance applications that used voice commands. Adding Hamano’s user-preference and device-specific features would be a known technique to improve the base system by better tailoring search results and recording functions to the specific user and their available devices.

• Additional Grounds: Petitioner asserted additional obviousness challenges, including grounds based on adding Wang to teach initializing similarity scores (Ground B), adding Hoffert to teach including media previews in prompts (Ground E), and adding Wood to teach managing insufficient storage space (Ground F).

4. Key Claim Construction Positions

• Petitioner argued that several terms should be given their explicit lexicographic definitions from the ’014 patent specification, such as "media asset" and "media asset identifier."
• Means-Plus-Function Terms: Petitioner contended that "Communications circuitry" (claim 11) and "Control circuitry configured to:" (claim 11) should be construed as means-plus-function terms under §112. Petitioner identified the claimed function for each term and pointed to the corresponding structures disclosed in the specification, such as microphones and processors executing software stored in memory.

5. Relief Requested

• Petitioner requested that the Board institute an inter partes review and cancel claims 1-20 of the ’014 patent as unpatentable.