PTAB

IPR2025-01318

Liveintent Inc v. Datonics LLC

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1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: PROVIDING COLLECTED PROFILES TO MEDIA PROPERTIES HAVING SPECIFIED INTERESTS
  • Brief Description: The ’445 patent describes a method for profile-based behavioral advertising. The system involves a central "profile owner" company that identifies media properties (e.g., websites) interested in specific user profiles, collects those profiles from "profile suppliers," and then facilitates the delivery of targeted advertisements to users when they visit the interested media property.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Claims 1-14 are obvious over Beyda in view of Herz.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Beyda (Application # 2005/0165644) and Herz (Application # 2009/0254971).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:

    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Beyda, the primary reference, discloses most elements of the challenged claims. Beyda teaches a system for audience targeting with both domain-level (e.g., a single publisher's website) and network-level (across multiple publishers) user profiling. In Beyda, a central Audience Matching Network (AMN) aggregates user data from participating publisher domains to create robust, cross-domain profiles. When a user visits a participating site, data agents (code on the webpage) use redirects to send browsing information to both the local domain's targeting system and the central AMN, updating profiles using unique identifiers stored in cookies.

    • Petitioner contended that while Beyda describes sharing profile data between publishers, it does not specify the exact mechanism for how one publisher can request and receive profile data collected by another. Herz allegedly supplies this missing element. Herz describes a "privacy-protected market for data exchange" centered on a Secure Data Interchange (SDI) data warehouse. A key feature of Herz is the use of "persistent queries," where an agent (e.g., a vendor or publisher) can place a standing request in the central SDI for profiles matching specific criteria. When new data entering the SDI matches a persistent query, the system automatically notifies the requesting agent.

    • In the proposed combination, Beyda’s central AMN would be modified to incorporate Herz's persistent query functionality. A first media property (e.g., Z.com) would submit a persistent query to the AMN for profiles of users interested in "travel." When a user visits a second media property (e.g., A.com) and their activity indicates an interest in travel, this information is sent to the AMN. The AMN, now equipped with Herz's logic, would detect that this new profile data satisfies Z.com's persistent query. The AMN would then automatically trigger a redirect of the user's browser to Z.com's targeting system. This redirect allows Z.com to receive the profile information and set its own cookie (a "tag") on the user's device, linking the user to the requested profile for future ad targeting. This process directly maps to the claim limitations of automatically selecting a media property based on a comparison of user profile data against stored requests and arranging for the storage of that profile linked to a tag.

    • Motivation to Combine: A Person of Ordinary Skill in the Art (POSITA) would combine Beyda and Herz for several reasons. First, Beyda taught the desirability of sharing profile data across a network but left the implementation details open; Herz provided a well-understood and logical mechanism (persistent queries) to accomplish this. Second, the combination would enable valuable "first-time personalization," allowing a publisher to target a user on their very first visit based on interests demonstrated on other sites. Third, it would create a new and efficient revenue stream, allowing publishers to sell valuable, fresh profile data to other publishers before its relevance decayed, a known issue in the industry.

    • Expectation of Success: A POSITA would have had a high expectation of success. Both Beyda and Herz describe software-based systems for managing and exchanging user profile data in a networked environment. Integrating Herz's persistent query module into Beyda's AMN was presented as a straightforward application of known data-processing techniques to achieve a predictable result—the efficient, automated sharing of user profiles based on pre-defined interests.

4. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requests the institution of an inter partes review and the cancellation of claims 1-14 of the ’445 patent as unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. §103.