PTAB

IPR2020-01147

Amazon.com Inc v. Freshub Ltd

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Petition
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1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: Systems and Methods for Scanning Information From Storage Area Contents
  • Brief Description: The ’810 patent specification primarily describes a networked refrigeration or food storage system that scans and tracks items. However, the challenged claims, added late in prosecution, are directed to a general voice processing system and method for e-commerce, where a user can place an order using spoken words which are then processed by a remote system to identify and procure items.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Claims 1, 12-13, 15-17, 26, 28-29 are obvious over Calderone, Ogasawara, and Sanchez.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Calderone (Application # 2001/0056350), Ogasawara (Patent 6,543,052), and Sanchez (Application # 2002/0194604).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that the combination of these references taught all limitations of the independent claims. Calderone disclosed a speech recognition system for interactive television that controls services like on-line shopping, including a remote user system (remote control, set-top box) that digitizes spoken commands and sends them to a central processing system. Ogasawara supplemented this by teaching a similar Internet-based shopping system with more detail on e-commerce functionalities, such as using databases with Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) and providing voice output. Sanchez further taught an interactive television system with a "virtual shopping cart" or "shopping list" feature, allowing users to accumulate and review items before purchase.
    • Motivation to Combine: A Person of Ordinary Skill in the Art (POSITA) would combine Calderone and Ogasawara because they addressed the same technical problem—speech-based e-commerce via a set-top box—and Ogasawara’s e-commerce details provided a logical refinement for Calderone’s system. A POSITA would further incorporate Sanchez's virtual shopping cart because it was a well-known and expected feature for any online shopping system, improving user experience.
    • Expectation of Success: Combining these known, complementary e-commerce features into a single system was technologically straightforward. For instance, adding Ogasawara's text-to-speech capability to Calderone’s system was a predictable implementation of a known technology to create a multi-modal user interface.

Ground 2: Claims 2-4, 7-11, 18, and 21-25 are obvious over Calderone, Ogasawara, and Sanchez, further in view of Partovi.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Calderone (Application # 2001/0056350), Ogasawara (Patent 6,543,052), Sanchez (Application # 2002/0194604), and Partovi (Patent 7,376,586).

  • Core Argument for this Ground:

    • Prior Art Mapping: This ground argued that the base combination of Calderone, Ogasawara, and Sanchez, which established the core e-commerce system, was rendered obvious in view of Partovi’s teachings on personalization and advanced user interaction features. Partovi disclosed a telephone-to-web voice portal for completing commercial transactions. Critically, Partovi taught personalizing the user experience by identifying items based on user-specific information such as location (e.g., suggesting nearby airports), user preferences (explicit or implicit), and recorded purchase history ("past habits"). Partovi also disclosed sharing transaction details via speech and text (voice receipts), offering alternative or additional items, and adding reminders related to purchases.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would be motivated to enhance the base e-commerce system with Partovi's personalization techniques to improve responses to user requests and increase the likelihood of a successful transaction. Because Partovi described its components as modular, a POSITA would have found it predictable to incorporate its features, such as using location and preference data to better match spoken orders with products, into the interactive television-based system of the primary references.

  • Additional Grounds: Petitioner asserted additional obviousness challenges based on the core combination of Calderone, Ogasawara, and Sanchez, further in view of:

    • Kuhn (Patent 6,553,345): To invalidate claims 5 and 19 by teaching a method to increase speech recognition accuracy by placing more weight on words related to specific types of items (e.g., movie categories).
    • Sichelman (Application # 2003/0235282): To invalidate claims 6 and 20 by teaching a method to increase recognition accuracy by weighting potential word matches based on the user's past purchase history.
    • Cooper (Patent 6,757,362): To invalidate claims 14 and 27 by teaching the use of a separate digital file to store each digitized item description from the user, disclosing a system architecture based on processing individual utterance files.

4. Key Claim Construction Positions

  • "increase recognition accuracy" (claims 5 and 6): Petitioner requested the Board adopt the construction agreed upon in a related district court case: "improve the likelihood of correctly identifying the item." This construction is central to the obviousness arguments for grounds relying on Kuhn and Sichelman, which explicitly teach methods for improving recognition results using contextual information.

5. Arguments Regarding Discretionary Denial

  • Petitioner argued that discretionary denial under §314(a) or §325(d) would be improper. The petition was the first filed against the patent and was timely under the one-year statutory window following service of the complaint in parallel litigation. Petitioner contended that the petition raised different invalidity grounds than the district court case (e.g., by relying on Sanchez, which was not asserted in litigation) and relied on art not previously before the Patent Office. Denying institution, particularly for claims not at issue in the litigation, would undermine the objective of the America Invents Act (AIA) to provide an effective alternative to district court proceedings.

6. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requested institution of an inter partes review and cancellation of claims 1-29 of the ’810 patent as unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. §103.