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27 November 2020PatentsMuireann Bolger

Twitter wins video streaming patent dispute at Fed Circuit

Twitter has secured a victory at the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, after it  upheld a US Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s decision to invalidate a patent owned by video streaming service VidStream.

In a ruling handed down on Wednesday, 25 November, the Federal Circuit rejected VidStream’s argument that the PTAB had erred in finding that its patent, US number 9,083,997, was unpatentable on the ground of obviousness.

The patent, titled “Recording and Publishing Content on Social Media Websites” covered “methods, systems, and apparatus, including encoded computer programmes or recording and publishing content on social networking websites and other websites”.

After VidStream accused Twitter of infringing the patent, Twitter filed two inter partes review petitions at PTAB in January 2019, successfully arguing that a book written by Anselm Bradford and Paul Haine (the Bradford book) was prior art against the patent.

On appeal, VidStream argued that the evidence from the book filed with Twitter’s petitions was published on December 13, 2015, and that Twitter failed to show that these pages were available before the ’997 patent’s filing date in May 2012.

VidStream stated that, consequently, “Twitter did not meet its burden of showing that Bradford was accessible prior art”.

However, Twitter held that the board correctly found that the collective evidence, including: the book’s copyright registration in 2011, its listing on Amazon web pages during that year, and the book’s existence in records dated August 25, 2011, all supported Twitter’s argument that the book was published and accessible before May 2012.

Twitter also filed the declaration of “an expert on library cataloging and classification”, Ingrid Hsieh-Yee, who agreed that Bradford was available at the Library of Congress in 2011.

Twitter also explained that the copy that it included with its petitions, which dated from 2015, was a reprint and not a new edition.

VidStream further argued that the board also violated its own rules when it considered evidence that was not provided with Twitter’s petitions, but with its replies, and that it had been deprived of a fair opportunity to respond to the evidence submitted with Twitter’s replies.

However, the court sided with PTAB and Twitter, concluding: “The evidence well supports the board’s finding that Bradford was published and publicly accessible before the ’997 patent’s 2012 priority date...We affirm the board’s ruling that Bradford is prior art against the ’997 patent.”

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