Skillz Platform Inc. v. AviaGames Inc.

Background

Skillz Platform Inc. brought a patent-infringement action against AviaGames Inc., alleging that AviaGames’s Pocket7Games platform and several standalone games infringed U.S. Patent No. 9,649,564, the ’564 Patent. The patent concerns using pseudo-random number seeds in mobile gaming competitions so that different players receive a common beginning gameplay experience. The opinion states that Skillz originally also asserted infringement of U.S. Patent No. 9,479,602, but that the court dismissed that claim.

The court held a claim-construction hearing, commonly called a Markman hearing, to determine the legal meaning of disputed patent language. The parties disputed the phrase “a stream of pseudo random number seeds characterized by a unique match identifier” in independent claims 1, 11, and 18 of the ’564 Patent. AviaGames argued that the unique match identifier had to be an “intrinsic component” of the stream of seeds. Skillz proposed that the identifier could be “describing or used for generating” the stream.

The parties also agreed on the construction of “generating, using the stream of pseudo-random number seeds, a plurality of pseudo-random numbers.” AviaGames had previously argued that claims 11 and 18 were indefinite, but stated that the agreed construction resolved that position.

Court’s Analysis

The court examined the claim language, the patent’s specification, the prosecution history, dictionary definitions, and expert declarations. It found that the claims provided little guidance about the relationship between the unique match identifier and the stream of seeds beyond requiring a common beginning gameplay experience for players in the same competition.

The specification supported the conclusion that the unique match identifier must be used to generate the stream of pseudo-random number seeds, so that gameplay can vary between tournaments while remaining consistent among participants in the same tournament. The court found no support for requiring the identifier to be an “intrinsic component” of the seeds and declined to import that limitation from an example in the specification.

The prosecution history provided little guidance. The patent’s preliminary claims used the phrase “associated with,” and Skillz later replaced that phrase with “characterized by” after an examiner rejected the preliminary claims as obvious. The court found no clear and unambiguous disclaimer that would exclude the broader construction proposed by Skillz.

The court also found that the expert declaration supporting AviaGames’s construction was conclusory and confusing, while the declaration supporting Skillz’s construction provided support consistent with the specification. However, the court rejected the “describing” portion of Skillz’s proposed construction because it had no clear meaning or boundaries when applied to numbers.

Ruling

The court adopted this construction for “a stream of pseudo random number seeds characterized by a unique match identifier”: “a stream of pseudo random number seeds wherein a unique match identifier is used for generating the stream of pseudo random number seeds.”

The court also adopted the agreed construction for “generating, using the stream of pseudo-random number seeds, a plurality of pseudo-random numbers”: “generating, at the client and using the stream of pseudo-random number seeds, a plurality of pseudo-random numbers.”

This order construed the patent claims; it did not decide whether AviaGames infringed the ’564 Patent.