PTAB

IPR2023-01240

Peloton Interactive Inc v. NEC Corp

Title: Content Delivery System
Brief Description: The ’427 patent describes a video-on-demand (VoD) content delivery system. The system uses connection control servers to establish a connection with user equipment, receives a content request, and uses an application server to select "sub content" (e.g., advertisements) based on user or content attributes to be inserted into the "main content," all while guaranteeing the communication bandwidth required for transmission.

Prior Art Relied Upon: Ueda (Application # 2009/0094321), SIP Standard (RFC 3261), and SDP Standard (RFC 4566).
Core Argument for this Ground:
- Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Ueda taught the core elements of the claimed content delivery system, including a server that provides main content, sub content (commercials), and a playlist to user equipment based on user preferences. However, Ueda's connection control was generic. The SIP Standard supplied the teaching of using one or more connection control servers (proxy servers) to establish and manage a connection based on equipment identifiers ("equipment specification information"). The SDP Standard, used within SIP messages, taught describing the media session, including specifying the necessary bandwidth.
- Motivation to Combine: A Person of Ordinary Skill in the Art (POSITA) would combine the content delivery architecture of Ueda with the well-known, industry-standard SIP and SDP protocols to provide a robust and predictable method for establishing connections and managing session metadata. This combination would be a straightforward implementation of known internet standards to improve the functionality of Ueda's system.
- Expectation of Success: A POSITA would have a high expectation of success, as SIP and SDP are designed to be interoperable and are the standard tools for initiating and describing multimedia sessions over the internet.

Prior Art Relied Upon: Ueda (Application # 2009/0094321), SIP Standard (RFC 3261), and Bechtolsheim (Application # 2009/0100496).
Core Argument for this Ground:
- Prior Art Mapping: This ground used the same base combination of Ueda and the SIP Standard as Ground 1. To meet the limitation of claim 1 requiring the system to "guarantee[] a communication bandwidth... at a same time that" it transmits a playlist, Petitioner relied on Bechtolsheim. Bechtolsheim was argued to explicitly teach a stream system that determines bandwidth requirements for content segments and executes a process to guarantee that bandwidth concurrently with the preparation and transmission of a playlist.
- Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would be motivated to incorporate the bandwidth management techniques of Bechtolsheim into the Ueda/SIP system to ensure a high-quality user experience by preventing buffering and video degradation. Bechtolsheim itself identified the problem of poor video quality resulting from insufficient bandwidth, providing the motivation for its own solution.
- Expectation of Success: The combination was presented as predictable, as it involved applying a known solution (Bechtolsheim's bandwidth management) to a known problem (maintaining stream quality) within a standard content delivery framework (Ueda combined with SIP).

Prior Art Relied Upon: Ueda (Application # 2009/0094321), SIP Standard (RFC 3261), SDP Standard (RFC 4566), and Cohee (Application # 2010/0010884).
Core Argument for this Ground:
- Prior Art Mapping: This ground built upon the combination in Ground 1 to address the additional limitations of claims 2 and 3, which required the user equipment to transmit viewing requests for both main and sub-content back to the server. Petitioner asserted that Cohee taught this element by disclosing a viewer client computer that transmits a media file request (a "content viewing request") to an ad server, where the request contains a reference to a media clip specified in a playlist.
- Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would combine Cohee's on-demand media request mechanism with the Ueda system to create a more flexible architecture where content need not be pre-downloaded. This would allow media clips to reside on a remote server and be fetched as needed, reducing local storage requirements on the user device and lowering privacy risks for content providers.
- Expectation of Success: This combination would have been a predictable implementation of a common client-server streaming architecture.
Additional Grounds: Petitioner asserted an additional obviousness challenge (Ground 4) against claims 2, 3, 15, and 17, which substituted Bechtolsheim for the SDP Standard from Ground 3, relying on similar motivations.

"equipment specification information": Petitioner proposed construing this term to mean "an identifier for identifying the user equipment." This construction was argued to be supported by the patent's specification and allows prior art disclosures of user IDs and device IDs (as in Ueda) to meet the claim limitation.
"at a same time…transmit[ting] the play-list information…": Petitioner argued this phrase should be construed to cover the patent's sole embodiment, where the playlist is transmitted in a standard SIP "OK" message upon completion of the bandwidth guarantee process. This interpretation is critical to mapping the teachings of the SIP Standard, SDP Standard, and Bechtolsheim to the claims.

Petitioner argued that discretionary denial under 35 U.S.C. §325(d) is inappropriate because the prior art references relied upon in the petition were not considered by the examiner during the original prosecution.
Petitioner further argued that denial under Fintiv is unwarranted. The co-pending district court litigation was asserted to be in its early stages, with a claim construction hearing not scheduled until February 2024 and trial not until March 2025. Petitioner also stated its intent to file a Sotera stipulation, promising not to pursue the same invalidity grounds in district court if an inter partes review (IPR) is instituted.

Petitioner requests institution of an IPR and cancellation of claims 1-9, 14-18, 20, 22, and 34-36 of the ’427 patent as unpatentable.