PTAB

IPR2019-01247

Google LLC v. Virentem Ventures LLC

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Petition
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1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: Creation and Presentation of Media Works to Audiences
  • Brief Description: The ’433 patent relates to systems and methods for dynamically altering media works for presentation to an audience. The system determines an audience's "affinity and/or aptitude" for portions of media content and uses this information to create and present altered versions of the media work, for example by changing the presentation rate.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Anticipation of Claims 3, 4, and 9 by Rochkind

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Rochkind (Patent 5,848,130).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Rochkind anticipates claims 3, 4, and 9 by disclosing a method for playing back recorded voice messages that addresses a user's difficulty in understanding numeric information at high speed. Rochkind teaches detecting numeric content (a "property") within a voice message (a "media work") and automatically playing it back at a slower rate than the non-numeric portions. Petitioner contended this directly maps to utilizing "audience...aptitude" (the inherent difficulty in comprehending numeric content at speed) associated with specific content to alter the presentation rate.
    • Dependent Claim Mapping: For dependent claim 4, Petitioner asserted that Rochkind's disclosure of allowing a user to set the overall playback speed meets the limitation of "accepting user input to determine the presentation rate." For claim 9, Petitioner argued that detecting whether a person spoke a number constitutes detecting "indicia of actions of objects."

Ground 2: Obviousness of Claims 1 and 7 over Walker in view of Bhadkamkar

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Walker (Patent 5,802,533) and Bhadkamkar (Patent 5,893,062).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner asserted that Walker discloses the core elements of claims 1 and 7 by teaching an enhanced text presentation method. Walker's system presents text one sentence at a time and allows a user to control the presentation speed, effectively "obtaining user input regarding presentation rates." It also correlates the time needed to read a sentence with its properties (e.g., difficulty, length), which Petitioner argued is a way of "inferring audience...aptitude." However, to the extent Walker does not explicitly link low aptitude (difficulty comprehending) to a slower rate, Bhadkamkar was introduced. Bhadkamkar explicitly teaches slowing the display rate of audio/video content so it can be "better digested."
    • Motivation to Combine: A person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA) would combine Walker's text presentation system with Bhadkamkar's principle of slowing content for better comprehension. This combination would predictably improve the reading experience in Walker's system by automatically slowing the presentation of more difficult sentences, which aligns with Walker's goal of creating an "improved human reading" system.
    • Expectation of Success: A POSITA would have a high expectation of success, as both references address the same problem of adjusting content presentation rates to match user comprehension, making the integration of Bhadkamkar's concepts into Walker's system straightforward.

Ground 3: Obviousness of Claim 9 over Mauldin in view of Bhadkamkar

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Mauldin (Patent 5,664,227) and Bhadkamkar (Patent 5,893,062).

  • Core Argument for this Ground:

    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Mauldin discloses a method for creating a "skim" version of an audio-visual work by detecting content properties, such as the presence of a specific person in an interview segment ("detecting media work content properties"). Mauldin also detects the "action of the objects being viewed," such as a person appearing or disappearing from a scene. While Mauldin teaches presenting the segments containing the detected person, it does not explicitly teach associating a different presentation rate with those segments. Bhadkamkar was introduced to supply this missing element, as it teaches varying the playback rate based on content analysis, such as slowing down playback when a particular person's voice is detected.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would be motivated to modify Mauldin's audio-visual skimming tool with Bhadkamkar's rate-variation technique. A user of Mauldin's system who finds a person of interest would benefit from the ability to slow down the playback of those specific segments to "more carefully scrutinize" the content, an improvement suggested by Bhadkamkar.
    • Expectation of Success: Success would be predictable, as both patents operate in the same technical field of audio-visual data presentation, and Bhadkamkar even cites Mauldin. The combination represented the application of a known technique (rate variation) to a known system (content skimming) to achieve a predictable improvement.

  • Additional Grounds: Petitioner asserted an additional obviousness challenge against claim 2 based on Walker, Bhadkamkar, and Iggulden (Patent 5,696,866), where Iggulden was cited for its teaching of a "SKIP" button to provide a rate that "causes a portion to be skipped." Petitioner also asserted that claim 8 is anticipated by Ottesen (Patent 5,778,135), which discloses a system for skipping media segments based on content ratings.

4. Key Claim Construction Positions

  • Petitioner proposed that the term "aptitude," which is central to claims 1-4 and 7, should be construed as "comprehension."
  • This construction was argued to be consistent with the patent's specification, which explicitly states that audience input can serve as a proxy for "aptitude for (this may also be referred to herein as ability to comprehend) the [media work]." The specification further gives an example of a user wanting to slow a media portion due to "difficulty comprehending the portion."

5. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requests institution of an inter partes review and cancellation of claims 1-4 and 7-9 of the ’433 patent as unpatentable.