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20 September 2018Patents

Microsoft victorious in mobile software IPR

The US Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) yesterday handed a win to Microsoft, finding that the technology company had shown the unpatentability of a mobile software patent.

Claims 1 to 10 of US number 8,848,892, called “Contact list with conversation point reminder” and owned by US-based Mira Advanced Technology Systems, were invalidated by the board in an inter partes review (IPR).

The patent describes a method for “attaching memo data to a contact list entry and providing users reminders of conversation points”.

Back in October 2016, Mira Advanced took Microsoft to the US District Court for the Northern District of Virginia, in a filing that claimed Microsoft had started using a software system covered by the patent in its Windows Phone products.

Mira Advanced alleged that Microsoft licenses and sells Windows Phone software which includes contact lists with functionality relating to conversation points, and therefore infringes the patent.

In March 2017, Microsoft filed a petition requesting an IPR. Six months later, the PTAB instituted review.

Microsoft alleged that the patent claims were obvious in light of two pieces of prior art: US patent number 7,130,617 (known as Matsumoto) and European patent application number EP 1,739,937 (known as Sony).

In its final written decision, the PTAB found that claims 1 to 4 and 6 to 9 were unpatentable as obvious over Matsumoto, while all of the claims were obvious over Sony or the combination of the two pieces of prior art.

“Sony’s and Matsumoto’s techniques (single database for all information, as opposed to multiple databases with a link between the data) were simple design choices and known equivalents that could have been substituted with a predictable result,” said the board.

Claims 1 to 10 of the ‘892 patent were found to be unpatentable.

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