AmberBlog

Back in March 2011 Ambercite and its partner Griffith Hack published a widely viewed patent landscape report of the smartphone patent wars, including a patent landscape map, part of which is reproduced below.

This report covered a broad range of areas, including a patent analysis on a Motorola (since acquired by Google) patent being asserted against Apple, US6246862 Sensor controlled user interface for portable communication device, invented by Grivas et al ('Grivas') . But at the time, we did not have our AmberScope search engine available for patent searching.

The patent itself concerns a function that should be familiar to many users of touchscreen based smartphones, namely how the touchscreen switches off when the phone is brought close to your body, such as when it is held up to your ear when making a phone call. In this way, body parts such as your ear are prevented from accidently hitting any of the virtual buttons normally found on a touchscreen during a call, and perhaps ending the call. Next time you are using a touchscreen phone to make a call, note how the screen blanks out when brought very close to your head - this is this function in action.

This function is obviously very important for touchscreen phones, and so the patent could have been a key Google patent in the smartphone patent wars.

In its ruling published 22 April 2013, the United States International Trade Commission has found in relation to this dispute that claim 1 of Grivas:

1. A portable communication device comprising:

 a processing section to control operation of the portable communication device in response to an input signal;

 a user interface comprising a touch sensitive input device coupled to the processing section, the touch sensitive input device actuatable to generate the input signal; and

 a sensor coupled to the user interface, the sensor to disable communication of the input signal to the processing section when the portable communication device is positioned in close proximity to a user, thereby, preventing inadvertent actuation of the touch sensitive input device.

was infringed by Apple - but that this claim was obvious in view of Motorola owned US6052464 Telephone set having a microphone for receiving or an earpiece for generating an acoustic signal via a keypad (first inventor Harris, hereafter 'Harris'), both in combination with ordinary general skill and combination with US Patent No. US5894298 Display apparatus to Hoeksma.

Harris discloses: 

In the case of the earpiece 18 being ported through the keypad 20, the controller 88 disables the plurality of key input signals responsive to one of: the ear cup 78 being positioned proximate to the person's ear 84 or the person's head 86 responsive to a signal from the proximity sensor 92,

Which raises the question - if AmberScope was available at the time of the dispute, could it have been used to find the Harris patent?

The answer is yes, via a simple two step process shown below:

1) Enter US6246862 into AmberScope, and use the Next button to systematically review the patents in this network, working from the highest ranked (automatically computed AmberScore) patent to the lowest, reviewing these patents for documents that are particularly relevant to the claimed invention. As we identify relevant patents, we manually assign a relevancy score of 0 (green) to 4 (red) and then explore the neighborhood of these patents.

In 10th highest ranked position, with an AmberScore of 2.5,we find US5729604  Safety switch for communication device filed by Nortel, which discloses in its abstract:

A communication device such as a portable wireless terminal for a telephone system having a proximity sensor to automatically switch the receiving transducer from receiver mode to loudspeaker mode. The proximity sensor is positioned in the handset such that the associated circuitry switches the transducer from loudspeaker mode to receiver mode in response to the handset being brought into proximity with the user's ear.

The relevance to the Grivas patent is quite obvious, although this does not disclose disabling the keypad via the proximity sensor.

2) Since the Nortel patent is clearly relevant, we make this the focus, and again start reviewing its connected patents in order of AmberScore value using the Next button.

And in 10th position we find US6052464, the Harris patent. Which as a matter of interest has the US patent codes 379/433, in contrast to the 455/566 and 455/95 US patent codes for the Grivas patent (and which further confirms the risks of searching patents using patent codes alone).

This is yet another example of how quick and simple seaching patent networks using powerful search engines such as AmberScope can be a very effective means of finding prior art.  

Leading smartphone wars patent analyst Florian Mueller wrote late last year about Apple's so called 'pinch to zoom' patent, which has been tentatively rejected in the first round of a re-examination process. The patent in question, US7844915, has a listed priority date of January 2007. In his blog, Mueller writes:

• Apple itself declared it the commercially most valuable one of the three multitouch software patents-in-suit, demanding a per-unit royalty for future (post-judgment) use of $3.10 while the other two software patents-in-suit are each valued at $2.02 per unit. 

• The prior art references underlying the (rejection on grounds of lack of novelty) is U.S. Patent No, 7,724,242 on a "touch driven method and apparatus to integrate and display multiple image layers forming alternate depictions of same subject matter". It doesn't specifically claim the pinch-to-zoom gesture as far as I can see, but it doesn't have to do that in order to serve as prior art, given that the '915 patent is only about one part (though an essential one) of the internal steps required to make pinch-to-zoom work. The other two prior art references (over the combination of which the '915 patent is deemed obvious) are the publication of a Japanese patent application (Japanese Pub. No. 2000-163031A, "Nomura") and this 1991 paper, entitled "The Automatic Recognition of Gestures" and authored by Dean Harris Rubine (Carnegie Mellon University).

US 7724242, by the way, discloses a pinch to zoom function for a touch sensitive display, whether  using a projector to display an image on the touch sensitive surface as shown in the figure below, or shown using 'thin profile display technologies...such as LCDs....'

But has all the prior art been found? This could be a good test for our new patent searching engine AmberScope.

This time of the year precludes a very elaborate analysis, but we can report from a preliminary evaluation using AmberScope, that the USPTO should add the following patents to the review process:

1) US8086971 Apparatus, Methods and computer program products providing finger-based and hand-based gesture commands for portable electronic device applications to Nokia, which discloses a pinch to zoom gesture (see Figure 8D, discussed in paragraph 46), and has a filing date of June 2006.

2) US2006/026521 Gestures for touch sensitive input devices to Apple, which extensively discloses a pinch to zoom function, and which has a priority date of July 2004.

Unlike the US 7724242 patent discussed by Mueller, both of these other prior art patents disclose touch sensitive displays for pinch to zoom.

In fact, the US patent office is aware of the Nokia patent (it is listed here), but I could find no reference to the 2006 Apple patent application as being listed prior art to the granted Apple "pinch to zoom" patent. 

 AmberScope is a new online patent searching tool developed by Ambercite in close cooperation with patent attorneys Griffith Hack, and designed to find patents that may be missed by existing patent search processes. AmberScope is further explained in the video found here, but how well does AmberScope work in practice?

In a previous blog, we have looked at the ability to find potential prior art for a Google patent covering glasses for augmented vision. Now it is the turn of an Apple patent to be placed under the prior art 'lens' of AmberScope. In this blog, we show how the use of filters can help make a patent search in a complex area both manageable and effective.

In 2011, Apple was granted a US patent US7877707 for a method of detecting hand shapes on a multi-touch screen, with a priority date of January 2007.

The granted patent includes a list of prior art document, but did the examiner for this patent identify all of the relevant prior art?

This is where AmberScope can be very useful. The image below shows what happens if we run a search for this patent US7877707 ('707) in AmberScope.

Each dot represents a patent, with the dot surrounded by the red circle being '707, which was the 'focus' patent of this patent network. All of the patents connected to the '707 patent are shown, and these are represented in a light grey colour. Some other features are:

• Blue lines show backward citations, and green lines forward citations.
• The question mark in the patent box shows that the patent has not yet been rated by the user. AmberScope includes the facilities to capture personal ratings on any patent, and this can be very handy for future referral. Currently, patents can be rated from 0 to 2.
• The '707 patent has an AmberScore rating of 1.8. AmberScore is a proprietary algorithm that considers the influence of the patent in the network. An AmberScore value of 1.8 is lower than average – the average granted US patent over the last 20 years has an AmberScore value of 1. The dot size on the screen is proportion to its AmberScore rating.
• The image also shows some of the highly rated patents that are connected to the patents that are connected to the '707 patent. These indirectly connected patents could be regarded as influential 'friends of friends'. We refer to these patents as 'ghost' patents, and they are mostly shown as greyed out in this case. 

Ghost patents can easily be identified as patents with connection lines overlying them , 

as opposed to the connection lines hidden behind the dots

Ghost patents can be very valuable, as these can disclose inventions that were not considered by the patent examiner (otherwise they would be listed in the search report) but still may be relevant.

But there are a lot of patents on the screen, almost too many to look at. So we made some simplifying if probably risky assumptions, in this case:

• Relevant prior art was not filed by Apple. We made this assumption because Apple should have declared all of the prior art it knew about to the US patent office, and this should have included earlier Apple patents
• The prior art would have been filed quite recently, say in the year 2000 or afterwards. It after all covers touch screens, a relative recent development. And being prior art, it would have been filed in 2007 or before.

These assumptions are risky, but can be justified in this case because this is only a worked example of a patent search.

Practically, these assumptions are entered into the filter box:

Which leads to the following image, containing fewer patents to review (the Apple patents have a green circle around them, which makes them easy to avoid).

In addition we can make a third assumption, namely that relevant prior art might be that which the examiner did not know about, which are the ghost patents. We can make this assumption because the examiner made the decision to grant the patent based on the prior art they knew about, and so it might harder to argue that the patent is invalid based on this already known prior art. And a fourth assumption, which is that if we are looking at the ghost patents, we should start with the biggest dots first, as AmberScore has told us that these likely are the most important and relevant patents.

Which suggests that we should start with the big ghost node on the far left of the screen, which happens to be US6888536 and has an AmberScore value of 11.

And In fact, when we look at it, it is quite relevant, disclosing:

Apparatus and methods are disclosed for simultaneously tracking multiple finger and palm contacts as hands approach, touch, and slide across a proximity-sensing compliant, and flexible multi-touch surface

So already, by just making a few assumptions, we have found what could be a relevant patent. But what happens if we make this the focus patent, as the patents connected to this might be very relevant?

It is quite a crowded landscape as you can see, and which we would expect from a high AmberScore value. But let's apply the same assumptions as before, namely narrowing our search to patents filed between 2000 and 2007 and highlighting the Apple patents, and see what happens:

Better, but still a little bit crowded. So we might make another assumption, that a relevant patent may be among the highest rated of the patents on the screen. But there is no need to specifically look for ghost patents, as we can assume that many of these patents will not be directly connected to the original Apple '707 patent.

How about we hide say the bottom 60% of the patents using the 'Percentage' filter? (i.e. hide the bottom 60% of patents as ranked by AmberScore)  By doing this, we can remove most of the patents, as shown in the image below.

And maybe we can start exploring these patents – as there is a manageable number. As we do so, we discover that one of these patents is very interesting, being US7618323 which covers:

A gaming machine has a processor for conducting a wagering game on the gaming machine and a gesture-sensing mechanism. The gesture-sensing mechanism can be used for providing various inputs

And we could keep going from here, perhaps change our assumptions, and explore every patent in these networks. This is exactly what you should do if you are doing a serious prior art search.

So does US 6888536 or US7618323 invalidate the apple patent '707? I will leave this for other people to judge, but I can see how they might be relevant.

But why did the patent examiner for the '707 patent miss either of these patents? This becomes clearer if we explore some of the key concepts usually used to search patents on, which are listed in the table below.

So while there are keywords in common, including in the title, the IPC and US patent classifications differ completely for all three patents. But if this is the case, why did AmberScope find these patents?

There are two main reason why AmberScope is so effective at finding patents

1. The first reason why is that AmberScope draws upon the collective intelligence of all of the examiners (and patent applicants) that examined the patents in these networks. Each examiner would have used a slightly different strategy to search for patents, and so would have found slightly different results. By combining these different results, AmberScope is able to find and highlight patents missed by individual examiners.
2. The second reason is that AmberScope applies principles of game design to help motivate the searcher and lead them to their final outcome, increasing their productivity and outcomes. Users tell us that AmberScope is fun to use compared to other patent searching engines - and this helps them achieve their desired objectives.

And this is why AmberScope is so effective at finding patents missed by conventional patent searching techniques.

As a summary of what we have just done, the patent search strategy used to find US7618323 starting with the Apple touchscreen patent US7787707 is shown below.

Interested in trying AmberScope for yourself? Check out Amberscope at amberscope.com while our free beta trial remains.

New York based Surfcast are suing Microsoft over the tiles used in the recently released Windows 8 products, and which are also seen in tablets and smartphones incorporating the latest Windows operating system.

The basis of this litigation is the Surfcast owned patent US6724403, which has a priority date of October 1999, and discloses:

a graphical user interface which organizes content from a variety of information sources into a grid of tiles, each of which can refresh its content independently of the others

But were Surfcast the first to patent this concept?

To help answer this question, we entered patent number US 6724403 into our patent search engine AmberScope, currently available in a free beta trial, and which employs the concept of Network Patent Searching to help find patents. This revealed a complex patent landscape, which may not that surprising given the current level of interest in user interfaces. In the picture below, the red circled dot shows the position of US 6724403, and the dots show all of the patents connected by backward or forward citations to this patent, along with a selected number of the indirectly connected patents

There are a number of ways we can analyse such a landscape. In this particular case, we chose to focus on the patents that were filed prior to the year 2001, and ranked all of the patents for their potential relevance to the Surfcast patent. AmberScope includes the ability to capture our rankings via a change in patent colour - in the diagram below red patents are ranked by us as having a relevancy score of 4 (out of a possible 4), orange patents have a relevancy score of 3, purple patents have a relevancy score of 2, and yellow patents have been read but not marked as relevant, 

It should be noted that none of these highly rated patents appeared to give a direct disclosure of the Surfcast patent. This is not surprising - if they did, being a known listed backward citation for the Surfcast patent, the Surfcast patent may not have been granted.

However the value of these patents is that they can guide us to other patents that may have been missed by the patent examiner for the Surfcast patent. In this case, one of the highly ranked prior art patents was US5479602 to Apple. This discloses: 

a method and means for generating and displaying a content-based depiction of a standard icon on the display of a computer

Which does differ from the Surfcast patent, but is a little bit similar.

Where it gets more interesting though, is what happen when the patent network is refocused on this Apple patent. This patent does not have that many connected patents, and one of them, a forward citation is US6988248 to Sun Microsystems (now owned by Oracle), and which has a priority date of June 1997.

US6988248 discloses the concept of a software 'container', where:

An animated indicator displays a graphical animation on the computer screen that represents a software container.....

 ...potentially including information such as amount, type, and activity of the container. As the state of the container changes, the animation routine may change accordingly. In this manner, users are presented with up-to-date and detailed information about a container represented by a small graphic pictorial. Thus, the user receives a continuous supply of useful information about the container without having to specifically select and view the container as a full screen representation.

The particular animation sequence is keyed to the software container represented, and may change as parameters of the software container change.

Which does appear to disclose some of the key elements of the Surfcast patent - suggesting that it could possibly be used to help invalidate the Surfcast patent.

This is a great example of the limitations of conventional patent searching based on keywords. Different patent applicants and attorneys can use different technical words for similar concepts. In this case, Sun used the term 'container' for a concept referred to by Surfcast as a 'tile'. But a rose is a rose by any other name, and this case, a 'container' has a similar apparent meaning to a 'tile'. Just to further confuse things, Apple in turn used the word 'icon' for the same concept.

How many patent searchers reading this would have used 'container' as a synonym for 'tile'? Or for 'icon'?

The example also highlights the inconsistent use of patent codes in this patent document. Consider the table below, which summarise these differences: 

So in summary, a search for earliers patents similar to Surfcast's US patent 6724403 using AmberScope has identified a Sun patent US6988248 that discloses a similar concept, that is connected to the Surfcast patent via an Apple patent. 

The search strategy for this search is shown below.

This case study is a great example of the additional value that AmberScope adds to your patent searching in additional to conventional techniques - and the dangers of relying on keyword or IPC searching alone.

 AmberScope is a new patent searching engine developed by Ambercite, in close cooperation with patent attorneys Griffith Hack, and able to find patents that may be missed by existing patent search processes. AmberScope is introduced in the video found here, but how well does AmberScope work in practice?

Earlier this year Google acquired three patents owned by Motion Research Technologies, and covering a pair of glasses for augmented vision. These patents included US7631968, filed in 2007, and which disclose a pair of glasses looking similar to this:

The claims of the patent cover the concept of the displayed image being controlled by the movement of the glasses. The granted patent includes a list of prior art documents, but did the examiner for this patent find all of the relevant prior art?

This is where AmberScope can be very helpful. The image below shows what happens if we run a search for this patent US7631968 ('968) in AmberScope.

Each dot represents a patent, with the dot surrounded by the red circle being '968, which was the 'focus' patent of this patent network. All of the patents connected to the '968 patent are shown, and these are represented in a light grey colour. Some other features are:

• Blue lines show backward citations, and green lines forward citations.
• The size of the dots represent its AmberScore rating. AmberScore is a proprietary algorithm that considers the influence of the patent in the network. In the image above, the '968 patent is shown with an AmberScore value of 0.24. This is lower than average – the average granted US patent over the last 20 years has an AmberScore value of 1.
• Thicker lines show stronger connections between two patents.
• The question mark in the patent box shows that the patent has not yet been rated by the user. AmberScope includes the facilities to capture 'personal ratings' on any patent, and this can be very handy for future referral. Currently, patents can be rated from 0 to 2.
• The image also shows some of the highly rated patents that are connected to the patents that are connected to the '968 patent. These indirectly connected patents could be regarded as influential 'friends of friends'. We refer to these patents as 'ghost' patents, and they are mostly shown as greyed out in this case. Ghost patents can easily be identified as patents with connection lines overlying them

     as opposed to the connection lines hidden behind the dots, which shows a directly connected patent  

Ghost patents can be very valuable, as these can disclose inventions that were not considered by the patent examiner (otherwise they would be listed in the search report) but still may be relevant.

But are these connected patents relevant to the '968 patent? 'Personal ratings' are just that, and so I went though and rated all of the connected patents, Figure 2. This also changed the colour of the dots, and the details of each patent rated are moved across to the table to the right after they have been rated.

In this figure, green patents are not thought to be relevant, blue patents are potentially relevant patents that are directly connected, and purple patents are potentially relevant ghost patents.

What do these patents disclose? The different patents all disclose different inventions, but one of the more interesting connected patents is US6349001, shown below, and which discloses: 

An eyeglass interface system is provided which integrates interface systems within eyewear. The system includes a display assembly and one or more audio and/or video assemblies mounted to an eyeglass frame

This is a relatively influential patent, with an AmberScore of 13, in other words 13 times as influential as the average granted US patent.

So already, AmberScope has shown its potential to find potentially relevant patents, even if in this case the examiner had also identified this patent as relevant prior art (hence the direct citation connection). But AmberScope includes another feature that can also assist in finding relevant prior art, namely the ability to 'walk the net', or refocus the patent network on any patent. This can be done as easily as selecting the 'more' button in the patent box as shown below. In this particular case, the button reads "178 more", which means that besides the connection between the '9001 patent and the '968 patent we started with, there are 178 other citation connections to this '9001 patent.

Selecting this 'more' button refocuses the patent network to be recentered on US6349001, allowing you to see it 178 direct connections, as well as its ghost patent connections.

Note that some of these patents are already coloured in yellow (the patent has been viewed), blue or purple This is because these patents were also seen in the network focused on the '968 patent, and AmberScope that remembered your previous ratings for these patents and transferred these ratings across. Practically, this means that you do not have to review these patents again, and instead can focus on the 'new' patents, which are coloured in grey.

But are any of these patents relevant to the Google glasses patent? To do this, we need to review the individual patent nodes - luckily this does not take that long within the AmberScope interface. As we do this, one of the more interesting patents we find is US5585871, which discloses:

A display apparatus secured to a temple or bridge contacting portion of an eyewear, the apparatus including means for monitoring the wearer's heart rate, lap position, laps completed, time elapsed, etc. An image of the collected data is transmitted into the wearer's field of view by means of a fiber optic element and projected at a focal point within the focusing range of the wearer's eyes.

This is not exactly the same as the Google glasses patent, but does include the element of augmented vision. Hence we have identified a second means of finding patents relevant to a starting patent.

Which is also potentially relevant.

But so are many of the 'ghost' patents that were shown when the network was focused on the  '968 patent, for example US6091546, which discloses

An eyeglass interface system is provided which integrates interface systems within eyewear. The system includes a display assembly and one or more audio and/or video assemblies mounted to an eyeglass frame. The display assembly is mounted to one temple and provides an image which can be viewed by the user

 This is an influential patent, with an AmberScore of 17 and 189 further connections. This is a third way of identifying relevant patents.

Ghost patents can also be used to refocus the network, which is what we have done below:

And when we do so, some of the new patents that we find when browsing this network may also be relevant to the '946 patent, for example US5719588, which discloses:

A viewing device for receiving video signals and generating corresponding images for viewing comprising a frame or support, adapted to be worn on the user's head, for example, a frame similar to a spectacle frame

So we have a fourth way of finding potentially relevant prior art, namely finding patents connected to ghost patents. And of course, we could make any of the patent in the new graph a focus patent, and continue to 'walk the net', and search for more relevant patents.

 Summary

In this short discussion, we have shown how it is possible to find potentially relevant prior art, some of it missed by the patent examiner, simply by starting with the patent number you are concerned about. This potentially relevant prior art could be

• directly connected patents (US6349001 in this example)
• patents connected to directly connected patents (US5585871)
• ghost patents (US6091546)
• patents connected to ghost patents ('friends of friends of friends', or  US5719588 in this example)

These different mechanisms are summarised in the diagram below.

And if you don't have a suitable starting patent, you could conduct a simple search for a start patent by running a simple conventional patent search for a starting patent which is close, but not close enough, to what you are looking for.

It is also worth considering what we have not done in this search:

• We have not looked at any keywords or semantic terms. Different patent applicants can use different keywords for the same concepts, and this can cause errors when searching for patents using keywords.
• We have not looked at any IPC or USPTO patent codes, which can be imprecise or incorrect
• We have not spent hours and hours looking long lists of patents, many of them irrelevant. Instead we have relied on the power of citation networks to quickly identify relevant prior art, some of which appear to have been missed by the original patent examiner.

And yet in this short demonstration we are only using part of the capability of AmberScope. Future blog posts will discuss these other capabilities and how they can assist you in finding relevant patents.

Postscript - comparison of keyword and patent codes in the patents found to the starting patent 

This is a good demonstration of how searching using keywords and patent codes could give you misleading results.

March 2013 update - some of the images shown above feature quite crowded patent landscapes. Thanks to an update in AmberScope introduced in February 2013, the same search would show a less crowded landscape which would be easier to navigate and faster to load - but still produce the same outcomes.