PTAB invalidates web page patent after Google request
The US Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) has invalidated patent claims directed to retrieving web pages after Google filed an inter partes review (IPR) against them.
In the decision, published on Tuesday, January 18, the PTAB said the patent is invalid over five pieces of prior art.
The patent in dispute (US number 8,661,094) is owned by Israeli company Spring Ventures and performs page retrieval using a “minimally restrictive syntax”, the PTAB noted.
It seeks to address several problems, including that in many countries, English is not the native language and the Latin alphabet is not used. As a result, meaningful World Wide Web addresses in such countries are typically created by transliterating the name of the site owner into Latin letters, the PTAB added.
In 2016, Spring Ventures sued Google for infringing the patent, but the US District Court for the District of Delaware agreed to stay the case in January 2018 pending the outcome of the IPR.
Google asked the PTAB to review claims 1 to 16 of the patent for being obvious over prior art. In December 2018, the PTAB found in an initial decision that Google was likely to prevail against claims 1 to 13, plus 15 and 16, and instituted an IPR of them.
Now, in its final written decision, the board has invalidated those claims. The case was heard by administrative patent judges Michael Zecher, Minn Chung and Scott Bain, with Bain writing the judgment.
The board noted that in IPRs filed before November 13, 2018, as in this case, judges review claim terms using the broadest reasonable interpretation (BRI) approach.
As the US Patent and Trademark Office confirmed in October 2018, the Phillips claim construction rule has replaced the BRI. Under Phillips, the standard for claim construction is based on how a person of ordinary skill in the art would understand patent claims at the time that the invention was created.
According to the PTAB judges, Google showed by “a preponderance of the evidence” that the patent claims were invalid over the teachings of Belfiore, Koren, Sotomayor, Osaku and Breese.
For example, Belfiore discloses “automatically initiating a search to locate resources within a distributed environment … in response to a user entering text via a user interface element”, while Breese is directed to providing search results that take into account “knowledge probability estimates” regarding a user’s already-known information, the PTAB explained.
As well as invalidating the claims, the PTAB dismissed Spring Ventures’ motion to amend four claims in the patent.
You can read the decision here.
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