PTAB

IPR2022-00907

HubSpot Inc v. Trident Holdings Inc

Key Events

Petition

petition

Title: Computer Implemented Marketing System
Brief Description: The ’977 patent describes an electronic commerce marketing system that automates and optimizes marketing campaigns. The system utilizes a "campaign engine" to generate campaigns, a "customer population data store" to hold customer information, and an "optimization engine" with adaptive scoring and prediction capabilities to improve campaign performance.

Prior Art Relied Upon: Jones (Patent 6,925,441).
Core Argument for this Ground:
- Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Jones, which discloses a system for optimizing targeted marketing, teaches all limitations of the challenged independent claims. Jones's "application servers" (including a risk management server and customer/fulfillment server) function as the claimed "campaign engine." Its "integrated database" for storing consumer information (demographic, transactional, etc.) constitutes the "customer population data store." Petitioner asserted that Jones’s optimization procedure, which uses an "offer-specific scoring" process based on customer data and campaign attributes, meets the limitations of the "optimization engine" and its "adaptive scoring process." For dependent claims 4 and 30, Petitioner argued that Jones's use of historical customer performance data to inform its scoring process teaches the claimed "prediction engine."
- Key Aspects: Petitioner contended that Jones discloses the key functionality that the patentee added during prosecution to overcome a rejection over a different reference (Melchione), specifically the "processing functionality to assemble campaign population members from campaign activities."

Prior Art Relied Upon: Jones (Patent 6,925,441) and Brooks (Patent 5,825,869).
Core Argument for this Ground:
- Prior Art Mapping: This ground addressed dependent claims 2 and 28, which add limitations requiring an "agent population data store" and a scoring system that orders agents based on customer and agent attributes. Petitioner argued that while Jones provides the base marketing system, Brooks teaches these specific agent-related features. Brooks discloses a call management system for skill-based routing that uses a "skills inventory database" to store agent resumes and attributes, which Petitioner mapped to the "agent population data store." Brooks further discloses scoring and ranking agents based on how well their skills match a customer's needs, satisfying the limitation of ordering the agent population based on customer and agent attributes.
- Motivation to Combine: Petitioner asserted a POSITA would combine Jones and Brooks because both relate to optimizing customer communications. A POSITA would have seen a clear benefit in incorporating Brooks's sophisticated agent-matching capabilities into Jones's broader marketing system to improve outcomes for campaigns involving services that typically use agents (e.g., real estate), which Jones explicitly contemplates.
- Expectation of Success: The combination was presented as a predictable integration of known systems to achieve an improved, but expected, result.

Prior Art Relied Upon: Grossman (Patent 5,889,799).
Core Argument for this Ground:
- Prior Art Mapping: As an alternative to Jones, Petitioner argued that Grossman alone renders the independent claims obvious. Grossman discloses a system for optimizing telephone contact campaigns. Petitioner mapped Grossman’s host computer and campaign optimizer to the claimed "campaign engine" and "optimization engine." The database of account records in Grossman was argued to be the "customer population data store." The "adaptive scoring" limitation was allegedly met by Grossman's process of reprocessing campaigns to reassign priorities based on updated contact outcomes. For dependent claims requiring a "prediction engine," Petitioner pointed to Grossman’s use of historical contact data and behavioral models to forecast campaign performance and construct call vectors.
Additional Grounds: Petitioner asserted additional obviousness challenges, including that claims 3 and 29 are obvious over Jones or Grossman in view of Midgley (a 1997 journal article teaching genetic algorithms for marketing optimization), and that claims 2, 28, and 47 are obvious over Grossman in view of Brooks.

Petitioner argued that discretionary denial would be inappropriate. Under §325(d), denial was argued to be improper because none of the asserted prior art references were considered by the examiner during the original prosecution.
Regarding discretionary denial under Fintiv, Petitioner contended that the parallel district court litigation was in its earliest stages, with no trial date set, no claim construction order issued, and no significant investment by the parties or the court. Petitioner further stipulated that it would not pursue in the district court litigation any invalidity ground on which the Board institutes an IPR, thereby mitigating concerns of duplicative efforts.

Petitioner requests institution of an inter partes review and cancellation of claims 1-4, 27-30, and 47 of the ’977 patent as unpatentable.