motorola
18 November 2013Patents

Motorola fails to convince CAFC over data claims

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has confirmed that Motorola Mobility cannot patent two claims directed to data communications.

Four judges  ruled on November 12 that claims 26 and 27 of the ‘006 patent – “Method and apparatus for communicating summarized data” – would be obvious.

The patent is directed to reducing the amount of data sent from a host to a remote device. It discloses a system that sends communications meeting certain filtering criteria to the remote device, as well as a summary of the filtered communications.

Although granted in 1999, the patent was re-examined after a request by Research in Motion (now Blackberry) in 2010. The examiner rejected two claims (26 and 27) in light of a case from 1993, known as Hoshi, which dealt with a system for reducing the amount of data transmitted to mobile stations.

On appeal, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) affirmed the examiner’s decision, before Motorola brought the case to the Federal Circuit.

The Google-owned company argued in court that the PTAB had incorrectly constructed two claim terms – “host” and “summary store” – in its decision.

But judges Dyk, Moore and Wallach dismissed Motorola’s arguments as unpersuasive.

“We agree with Motorola that the plain meaning of ‘host’ requires that the host ‘host something’. However, Hoshi’s MSS [mobile station server] discloses a ‘host’ even under this construction.

“We hold that substantial evidence supports the board’s finding that Hoshi’s MSS discloses a ‘host’ as recited in the representative claim 26,” they said.

The judges added that the construction of “summary store” was consistent with the “plain meaning” of the term.

“The PTO did not read ‘summary’ out of the claim because it found that Hoshi’s display buffer enables display of a summary list of emails. Moreover, its construction is consistent with the ‘006 patent’s broad definition of ‘store’ to be ‘any available device ... for storage.’”

Motorola had asserted the ‘006 patent against Apple in their continuing patent dispute, though it was later dropped.

Scott McKeown, partner at Oblon, Spivak McClelland, Maier & Neustadt LLP, who represents Motorola, declined to comment.

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