The Federal Circuit has affirmed a call by the Patent Trial and Enchantment Board (PTAB) that the challenged claims of Bot M8 LLC’s gaming patent, U.S. Patent No. 8,078,540, had been unpatentable.
Sony Interactive Leisure LLC petitioned for Inter partes overview (IPR) of claims 1-6 of the patent, which issues a gaming machine that authenticates sure knowledge and that has each a motherboard and a special board.
Because the court docket famous, two features of the declare are related:
First, the unbiased claims (claims 1 and 4) require that the “sport program” be written to the motherboard solely after the sport program has been authenticated. Second, the dependent claims (claims 2, 3, 5, and 6) require two totally different CPUs—one on the motherboard, one on a special board— for executing the “authentication program” and “preliminary authentication program” respectively.
The PTAB discovered the claims unpatentable.
Bot M8 appealed, arguing that the PTAB misconstrued the unbiased claims and that it erred in figuring out the dependent claims unpatentable for obviousness.
Bot M8 argued that the PTAB misconstrued declare 1 to seek out that prior artwork references disclosed the component that requires writing the sport program to the motherboard solely after authenticating the sport program.
The court docket famous that declare 1 “undisputedly precludes writing your entire sport program to the motherboard earlier than authenticating the sport program.”
Nonetheless, Bot M8 maintained that declare 1 additional precluded writing any knowledge—sport program or not—to the motherboard earlier than authenticating the sport program.
The PTAB discovered this argument inconsistent with the declare language. The Federal Circuit agreed, stating:
Though declare 1 precludes writing the sport program to the motherboard earlier than it’s authenticated, Bot M8 affords no persuasive purpose to construe the declare to preclude writing different knowledge to the motherboard earlier than the sport program is authenticated.
Bot M8 additionally argued that declare 1 not less than precluded writing any portion of the sport program to the motherboard earlier than authenticating the sport program. In making an attempt to point out that the PTAB utilized a opposite development, Bot M8 pointed to a single sentence within the PTAB’s remaining written resolution, the place the Board said:
[Bot M8] seeks to learn into declare 1 a requirement that nothing associated to, or any portion of, the gaming data be learn into [the motherboard’s] RAM from the mass storage system of Johnson previous to authenticating the sport program.
The Federal Circuit assumed for the sake of argument that Bot M8 was right and that declare 1 did preclude writing any portion of the sport program to the motherboard earlier than authenticating the sport program. Nonetheless, the court docket nonetheless affirmed, discovering that the PTAB’s errors, if any, was innocent:
Bot M8 fails to exhibit that the Board, in making its unpatentability determinations, really relied—and even may need relied—on a development that allows writing parts of the sport program to the motherboard earlier than authenticating the sport program. By all indications, the Board merely didn’t must; it discovered that each [prior art references] disclose writing solely non-game-program knowledge to the motherboard earlier than authenticating the sport program.
The court docket concluded that substantial proof supported the very fact findings underpinning the PTAB’s obviousness willpower, and in any other case noticed no error in that willpower.