The Receivership Estate of AudienceScience Inc. v. Google LLC

Background

The Receivership Estate of AudienceScience Inc. and Revitalization Partners, LLC sued Google LLC and YouTube LLC for allegedly infringing three patents: U.S. Patent Nos. 7,747,676; 7,882,175; and 8,082,298. The patents share a written description and concern selecting and presenting an advertising message based on both a user’s browsing history and the content of a particular web page. The parties disputed the meaning of six groups of claim terms.

Claim construction is the court’s process for deciding what patent-claim language means. The court considered the claim language, the patent specifications, the patent-application prosecution history, other evidence, and the parties’ arguments. For indefiniteness—a challenge asserting that a patent claim does not define its scope clearly enough—the party making the challenge had to prove the issue by clear and convincing evidence.

Rulings on the disputed terms

“Web page”

The plaintiffs argued that “web page” needed no construction. The defendants proposed “a page from a website on the World Wide Web, identified by a unique uniform resource locator (URL) and displayed by a web browser.”

The court adopted most of the defendants’ proposal but rejected the web-browser requirement. It construed “web page” to mean “a page from a website on the World Wide Web, identified by a unique uniform resource locator (URL).” The court relied on the patents’ references to requested pages, Internet access, and URLs, but found no intrinsic or extrinsic evidence requiring display through a web browser.

“Keywords”

The defendants proposed defining “keywords” as “words selected to describe the content of a web page or advertising message.” The court agreed that the term includes words that are selected, but rejected the limitation that the words must describe content. The court explained that the patents also use concepts such as words corresponding or attributed to pages and advertisements.

The court construed “keywords” to mean “words selected to correspond to a web page or advertising message.”

“Pages recently requested by the user” and “pages recently visited by the user”

The defendants argued that these terms were indefinite because “recently” is a term of degree without a sufficiently definite time period. The court rejected that argument and found both terms not indefinite.

The court reasoned that the patent describes a configurable period for reviewing browsing history, which could be an hour, a day, a week, or a month. In the court’s view, “recently” refers to functionality allowing practitioners to choose how much browsing history to include, rather than imposing one subjective temporal limit.

“Mapping” terms

The parties disputed four related terms involving relationships between pages, keywords, and advertising messages. The defendants proposed requiring use of a table or other data structure to establish a direct correspondence. The court found that “mapping” required some construction but rejected both the table-or-data-structure limitation and the direct-correspondence limitation.

The court construed the page-and-keyword mapping terms as “establishing a correspondence between pages and keywords.” It construed the advertising-message mapping terms as “establishing a correspondence between advertising messages and keywords.”

“The set of subjects”

The defendants argued that “the set of subjects” in dependent claims 13–16 of the ’298 patent was indefinite because the phrase lacked an express earlier reference, known as an antecedent basis. The plaintiffs acknowledged the lack of an explicit antecedent basis but argued that the phrase referred back to “a set of keywords” in independent claim 12.

The court found that the defendants had not shown by clear and convincing evidence that the claims failed to inform a skilled reader of their scope with reasonable certainty. It concluded that, based on the claims’ context and use of the word “set,” a skilled reader would understand “the set of subjects” to refer back to the “set of keywords” in claim 12. The court therefore found the terms not indefinite.

Disposition and effect

The court entered its stated constructions for all disputed terms and ordered that “web page,” “keywords,” the “mapping” terms, and the two groups of challenged terms have the meanings listed above. This claim-construction order determines how the disputed patent language is read in the continuing infringement dispute; the opinion does not decide whether Google LLC or YouTube LLC infringed the patents.

Judge

The order was signed by United States District Judge Edward J. Davila.