Philips prevails over Google in audio encoding IPR appeal
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has backed Philips in an attempt by Google to have one of the Dutch conglomerate’s audio encoding patents invalidated.
In its decision, issued yesterday, October 24 the Federal Circuit affirmed an earlier decision of the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in an inter partes review (IPR) of the Philips patent.
The USPTO’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) initiated the IPR proceedings in 2017 after Google claimed that the Philips audio encoding patent (US number 6,772,114), was obvious in light of prior art.
Google claimed that certain claims of the patent, which covers a “high frequency and low frequency audio signal encoding and decoding system”, were already disclosed in a previous application under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (number 98/52187).
All of the challenged claims in the ‘114 patent require a “high-pass filter” which is applied to a noise signal and generates a “reconstructed signal within a high-frequency range”.
Google argued that the low-pass filter and reflection steps described in the cited PCT application disclosed the ‘114 patent’s high-pass filter because they both produced the “same result”.
According to Google, the low and high-pass filters described in the respective patents also achieved the “desired high-band portion of the input signal”.
The Federal Circuit was unconvinced, concluding that the PCT application’s low-pass filter did not transmit a high-frequency signal as described in the ‘114 patent.
Google also attempted to raise the argument that it would have been obvious to replace the low-pass filter with the alternative laid out in the ‘114 patent. The PTAB refused to consider this argument as it was only raised in the reply brief rather than the initial IPR petition.
The Federal Circuit backed the PTAB in this respect, affirming its conclusion that Philips did not have a “fair and meaningful opportunity” to respond to this argument.
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