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11 September 2018Patents

Apple and Samsung grab win at Federal Circuit

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit handed victory to technology companies Apple and Samsung yesterday, in a dispute over a patent covering wireless hot spot technology.

In a precedential decision, the Federal Circuit affirmed the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s (PTAB) finding that claims of a patent owned by IXI IP were obvious.

IXI IP’s patent, US number 7,039,033, is called “System, device and computer readable medium for providing a managed wireless network using short-range radio signals”.

Apple and Samsung filed a petition to institute an inter partes review (IPR) of certain claims, alleging that they were obvious in light of prior art, including “PCT Publication number WO 01/76154 to Marchand (Marchand)” and a book called “The Jini Specification”.

Marchand, called “Ad-hoc network and gateway,” discloses “an ad-hoc network and a gateway that provides an interface between external wireless IP networks and devices in the ad-hoc network”.

The ad-hoc network uses Bluetooth, IP, and JINI (a specific architecture “designed for deploying and using services in a network”) technologies to allow its terminal devices to access the cellular network through the phone.

The PTAB concluded that Apple and Samsung had established that the combination of prior art taught every limitation of claim 1 (which all parties agreed was representative of all challenged claims).

On appeal against the decision, IXI IP argued that the single issue was whether Marchand would be read as describing an implementation in which the JINI look up service (LUS), which identifies services provided on the network, is located on the phone.

While acknowledging that Marchand doesn’t expressly state that the JINI LUS is found on the phone, Apple and Samsung argued that a person skilled in the art would read Marchand to understand that it may be located there.

“We conclude that substantial evidence supports the board’s finding,” said the Federal Circuit.

According to the court, Marchand implicitly discloses that its phone has a LUS because “all of the network devices publish their services when the phone connects to the local ad-hoc network and the cellular network”.

Based on this disclosure and other disclosures, the court affirmed the PTAB’s decision that Marchand teaches that the JINI LUS is located on the phone.

The Federal Circuit also dismissed IXI IP’s arguments that locating the LUS on the phone would have “rendered the system inoperable” and that Marchand discloses that the LUS is on a laptop, not the phone.

The court affirmed the PTAB’s decision that the challenged claims of the ‘033 patent are invalid as obvious.

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