PTAB

IPR2022-00103

Code200 UAB v. Bright Data Ltd

Case #: IPR2022-00103
Patent #: 11,044,342
Filed: October 29, 2021
Petitioner(s): Code200, UAB; Teso LT, UAB; Metacluster LT, UAB; and Oxysales, UAB
Patent Owner(s): Bright Data Ltd.
Challenged Claims: 1, 2, 6-11, 13, 15, 16, and 18-23

Title: System Providing Faster and More Efficient Data Communication
Brief Description: The ’342 patent discloses a system for increasing network communication speed by intercepting content requests and offloading data transfers from web servers to a network of nearby peers that have previously received the requested content.

Prior Art Relied Upon: Crowds (Michael K. Reiter et al., Crowds: Anonymity for Web Transactions, November 1998).
Core Argument for this Ground:
- Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Crowds, a system for protecting user anonymity by routing web requests through a random path of peer computers (“jondos”), discloses every limitation of the challenged claims. The petition mapped the claim elements to a specific example path in Crowds ("5→4→6→server"), identifying "jondo 6" as the claimed "first client device," "jondo 4" as the "second server," and "web server 5" as the "web server." In this path, the first client device (jondo 6) receives a request from the second server (jondo 4), retrieves content from the web server (server 5), and sends the content back to the second server (jondo 4), thereby performing the core steps of independent claim 1.
- Key Aspects: The argument relies heavily on construing "client device" and "server" based on their functional roles in a given transaction, allowing generic peer computers in Crowds to satisfy both limitations.

Prior Art Relied Upon: Crowds (a 1998 paper on web anonymity) and RFC 1122 (a 1989 IETF specification for TCP/IP hosts).
Core Argument for this Ground:
- Prior Art Mapping: Crowds discloses the base system of interconnected jondos communicating via TCP, as established in Ground 1. RFC 1122 describes an optional but standard feature for TCP connections: a "keep-alive" mechanism where devices periodically probe each other to confirm an idle connection is still active. Petitioner asserted that adding this keep-alive functionality to the TCP connections between jondos in Crowds would result in the "periodically communicating" (claim 8) by "exchanging 'keep alive' messages" (claim 9).
- Motivation to Combine: A person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA) would combine Crowds with the teachings of RFC 1122 to improve the robustness of the jondo network. Implementing keep-alive messages would prevent jondo devices from unnecessarily expending resources maintaining connections to other jondos that have crashed or become unresponsive, and would prevent inactivity from causing connections to terminate.
- Expectation of Success: Because keep-alive functionality was a well-understood, standard feature of the TCP protocol, a POSITA would have had a high expectation of success in implementing it within the TCP-based Crowds system to achieve predictable benefits.

Prior Art Relied Upon: Crowds (a 1998 paper on web anonymity) and RFC 2616 (a 1999 IETF specification for HTTP/1.1).
Core Argument for this Ground:
- Prior Art Mapping: Crowds discloses the base system. RFC 2616, the definitive specification for HTTP, describes using caching in intermediary proxies to improve performance. It also details a validation mechanism where a cache can send a conditional request to an origin server to determine if its stored content is still valid. Petitioner argued it would have been obvious to add this caching and validation functionality to the jondo devices in Crowds. A jondo acting as an intermediary (e.g., jondo 6) would then determine if received content is valid (claim 10) based on the HTTP header response from the web server (claim 11), as specified by RFC 2616.
- Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would have been motivated to add the caching functionality of RFC 2616 to the jondos in Crowds for the well-understood and significant performance improvements it provides. Caching would reduce latency and the need to send full requests and responses, improving the user experience without compromising the anonymity goals of Crowds.
- Expectation of Success: Caching was a proven, fundamental technology in HTTP by the patent’s priority date. A POSITA would have reasonably expected that implementing this standard functionality in the jondos, which act as HTTP proxies, would work as intended.

"first client device" / "second server": Petitioner argued that these terms should be construed according to their plain and ordinary meaning, defined by the functional role a device is performing in a particular transaction, not by any specific hardware or software.
Proposed Construction:
- first client device: "a communication device that is operating in the role of a client"
- second server: "a device that is operating in the role of a server and that is not the first client device"
Importance: This construction is critical to the invalidity arguments, as it allows the generic peer computers ("jondos") in the Crowds reference, which can act as both clients and servers depending on their position in a request path, to satisfy the claim limitations. The petition noted that a district court adopted these constructions in related litigation involving parent patents.

Petitioner argued that discretionary denial under 35 U.S.C. §325(d) would be inappropriate based on the Advanced Bionics framework.
The petition asserted that although the Examiner considered Crowds, RFC 1122, and RFC 2616 during prosecution (satisfying part one of the framework), the Examiner materially erred by failing to issue any prior art rejection and allowing the claims. Petitioner contended that Crowds alone or in combination clearly discloses the limitations the Examiner identified as novel in the Notice of Allowance, and this error warrants institution of the inter partes review (IPR).

Petitioner requested institution of an IPR and cancellation of claims 1, 2, 6-11, 13, 15, 16, and 18-23 of the ’342 patent as unpatentable.