Weisner v. Google LLC

Background

The plaintiff, Sholem Weisner, and Google LLC submitted competing interpretations of ambiguous language in U.S. Patent Nos. 10,394,905 and 10,642,911. The patents concern systems and methods that use information about physical interactions between individual members and businesses to enhance internet or digital search results. The caption also lists Shmuel Nemanov as an “Involuntary Party.”

Claim construction

Under the Supreme Court’s procedure for interpreting patent claims, the court reviewed the parties’ proposed meanings for disputed claim language. The court adopted the constructions in Column Four of the attached chart.

Among other things, the court construed the ’905 patent’s preamble as describing methods and systems for enhancing business searches using records of people’s physical encounters. It also ruled that no special construction was necessary for “processing system” and “providing an application.”

The court defined “upon a physical encounter” as involving an individual member entering the physical location of a stationary vendor member, causing the individual’s device to automatically send the relevant key data of the vendor and the individual to the processing system. It construed “a stationary vendor member” as a business at a physical location that belongs to the member network. It defined “key data” as information a member selected to receive from or transmit to the network database or other members, and “physical location histories” as histories over time of physical interactions that include key data from the interacting members.

For the ’905 patent, the court construed the search-ranking language to require improving the ranking of a first stationary vendor member based on a physical-location relationship. That relationship requires key data from the first vendor to appear in a reference individual member’s physical-location history, while key data from a second vendor appears in both the searching person’s and the reference individual’s histories.

For the ’911 patent, the court construed the search-enhancement language as using URLs of stationary vendor members found in logs recording physical interactions between individual members and stationary vendor members. It ruled that each individual-member and stationary-vendor account has a unique associated URL. The court also interpreted the location-history language as allowing a device to make successive entries recording a business’s key data, time, place, and URL when the individual physically interacts with the business at its physical location.

The court further ruled that, upon a physical encounter and receipt or transmission of key data, the positioning system determines the individual member’s device location. It construed the search-engine language as searching a database containing the searching individual member’s accumulated physical-location history, including entries for stationary vendor-member URLs. For the phrase “assigning a priority,” the court adopted Google’s proposed construction: providing a weighting factor that improves the position of a particular stationary vendor member’s URL when it appears in the searching individual’s location history.

Ruling and effect

The court entered the claim constructions shown in Column Four of the chart. This order interprets the patent language for use in the litigation; the opinion does not state that the court decided infringement, patent validity, or damages. Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein signed the order.