Chewy, Inc. v. International Business Machines Corporation

Background

IBM sent Chewy a July 6, 2020 letter alleging that Chewy’s website and mobile applications infringed four IBM patents. Chewy then filed this action seeking a declaration that it did not infringe those patents. IBM answered and asserted infringement counterclaims involving those patents, later adding a fifth patent, the ’831 patent.

Before this decision, the court denied Chewy’s motion to dismiss several counterclaims and issued a claim-construction order after a hearing. Claim construction is the court’s interpretation of what patent claims mean. The court held, among other things, that the ’849 patent’s requirement of selectively storing advertising objects meant retrieving and storing advertisements at a user’s system in anticipation of displaying them with an application. It also construed terms in the ’831 and ’034 patents concerning webpage spacing and object types.

Chewy moved for summary judgment on IBM’s remaining infringement claims. Summary judgment is a decision without a trial when no reasonable factfinder could resolve a material issue for the opposing party. Chewy argued that its products did not meet required elements of the asserted claims and that the ’443 and ’849 patents were invalid. IBM cross-moved for partial summary judgment that the ’831 patent’s asserted claims were not anticipated or obvious.

The ’849 Patent

The ’849 patent concerns presenting individualized advertising through a computer network, including storing advertising at a user’s system before it is needed for display. IBM relied on several theories involving Chewy’s content-delivery servers, browser or mobile-device caching, delayed loading, and product carousels.

The court held that none of those theories satisfied the required “selectively storing” element. Storage at a content-delivery server did not occur at the user’s reception system. Caching after the user requested the relevant page was not pre-fetching because the patent required retrieval before the user requested the page. Delayed loading likewise occurred in response to the user’s request rather than in anticipation of it.

The court also held that Chewy did not establish individualized targeting criteria for particular users based on their interaction history, demographics, or location. Evidence that Chewy used aggregated information to show products related to the page a user was viewing did not establish the user-specific characterization required by the patent. The court granted Chewy summary judgment on non-infringement of all asserted claims of the ’849 patent and did not reach Chewy’s invalidity argument for that patent.

The ’831 Patent

The ’831 patent concerns automatically reformatting webpages to address spacing between hyperlinks. Chewy argued that its website did not perform the claimed steps of rendering a page on a virtual display or determining whether the page fell within a proximity policy.

The court rejected IBM’s theory that the browser’s “render tree”—a structure containing webpage content and style instructions—was the claimed rendered page. The court concluded that a rendered page had to be in a form essentially ready to be viewed, with the size and location of webpage elements determined. The render tree was only a set of instructions and did not yet define those locations.

The court also rejected IBM’s argument that Chewy’s browser-size-dependent media queries were user-defined proximity policies. Although the user could change the browser’s width, Chewy—not the user—set the spacing rules in the media queries. The court granted Chewy summary judgment on all asserted claims of the ’831 patent. Because of that ruling, it denied as moot IBM’s cross-motion for partial summary judgment concerning anticipation and obviousness.

The ’034 Patent

The ’034 patent concerns magnifying web content based on the type of content, such as an image, video, text, or audio object. IBM relied on Chewy’s product-page feature that replaced a main product image with a larger thumbnail image or a video when the user hovered over a thumbnail.

The court held that Chewy’s code did not identify the type of the hovered-over object as required by the patent. The thumbnails were static image objects. The code identified whether a thumbnail had a particular attribute, but it did not identify the object type of the hovered-over object itself. A thumbnail showing a play icon and the word “video” was not a video object under the patent’s meaning of that term. The court therefore granted Chewy summary judgment of non-infringement on all asserted claims of the ’034 patent.

The ’443 Patent

The ’443 patent concerns targeting advertisements based on search-result items rather than search queries or a user profile. The court had previously held that the claims were directed to an abstract concept under the first step of the two-part test from Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank. This decision addressed the second step, which asks whether the claim adds an inventive concept sufficient to make the abstract idea patent-eligible.

The court held that the asserted claims did not add enough technical detail or an inventive concept. Using a repository or database to store advertising information was a conventional way to implement the abstract advertising idea. Offline batch processing, graphical presentation of the relationship between search results and advertisements, and collecting user information were also insufficient additions. The court held that the asserted claims of the ’443 patent were invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101 and granted Chewy summary judgment of invalidity. It did not address Chewy’s alternative non-infringement arguments for that patent.

Disposition

The court granted Chewy’s motion for summary judgment in full and denied IBM’s cross-motion for partial summary judgment. The conclusion directed entry of final judgment for Chewy, declared that Chewy did not infringe IBM’s asserted patent claims, and stated that IBM’s counterclaims were dismissed with prejudice. The Clerk was directed to close the listed docket entries and the case docket.

Significance of the ruling

The decision resolved the patent dispute at summary judgment. It found no infringement of the asserted claims of three patents and found the asserted claims of a fourth patent invalid under Section 101. The ruling on IBM’s cross-motion was described as moot in the discussion, while the conclusion stated simply that the motion was denied.