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.  

What does a half billion dollar (and counting) quartet of patents look like?

VirnetX have just had their $336 million patent judgement against Apple for the use of their Facetime product upheld. This comes on the back of recent wins against Microsoft ($200m) and Siemens - and VirnetX are going back for another bite from Apple, as well as launching a $258 million lawsuit against Cisco.

In this blog, we:

• review the four patents being asserted by VirnetX and why they were granted,
• look for potentially relevant prior art missed to date by the USPTO, and show the connection between these patents and patents owned by Apple, Microsoft, Cisco and others,
• Compare the relative dominance of the leading VirnetX patent to the closest found prior art.

About VirnetX and its patents

VirnetX is a publicly listed technology company whose shares have surged recently on the back of patent assertion wins against both Microsoft, Apple and Siemens. No doubt due to these victories, the share price of VirnetX has risen tenfold since January 2010.

VirnetX claim to have 46 patents and over 100 pending applications. However for the purpose of this blog, we will concentrate on the four patents and their claims successfully asserted against Apple, as recently affirmed by the Eastern District of Texas.

1) US6502135 ('135) was filed in 2000, and claims priority back to 1998. Claims 1, 3, 7, 8 were held to be asserted by the judgement in the Apple case. This patent has 33 backward citations according to Espacenet, 165 forward citations, and an AmberScore (our normalised measure of patent dominance) value of 12.

1. A method of transparently creating a virtual private network (VPN) between a client computer and a target computer, comprising the steps of:

(1) generating from the client computer a Domain Name Service (DNS) request that requests an IP address corresponding to a domain name associated with the target computer;

(2) determining whether the DNS request transmitted in step (1) is requesting access to a secure web site; and

(3) in response to determining that the DNS request in step (2) is requesting access to a secure target web site, automatically initiating the VPN between the client computer and the target computer.

In other words, a client computer (for example your smartphone) requests from a domain name server an IP address associated with a second computer, for example your friend's smartphone. If this IP address is for a secure website, a 'virtual private network' is established.

As a matter of interest, a virtual private network, according to Wikipedia, means:

A virtual private network (VPN) extends a private network and the resources contained in the network across public networks like the internet. It enables a host computer to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if it were a private network with all the functionality, security and management policies of the private network. This is done by establishing a virtual point-to-point connection through the use of dedicated connections, encryption, or a combination of the two.

And why was the patent granted? The applicant argued in a submission to the USPTO dated 13 June 2002 that this patent was inventive over the prior art raised by examiner, 'Boden' (US6330562) in view of 'Risley' (US6332158):

does not disclose establishing a VPN (virtual private network) based on a DNS request for a IP address.

And this argument appeared to have been persuasive.

2) US7418504 was filed in 2003. Claims 1, 2, 5, 16, 21 and 27 were held to be asserted. This patent has 102 backward citations, 26 forward citations and an AmberScore value of 5.2. Claim 1 appears to be similar to claim one of the '135 patent:

A system for providing a domain name service for establishing a secure communication link, the system comprising: a domain name service system configured to be connected to a communication network, to store a plurality of domain names and corresponding network addresses, to receive a query for a network address, and to comprise an indication that the domain name service system supports establishing a secure communication link.

Again this appears to be similar to the '135 patent.

3) US7490151 was filed in 2002. Claims 1 and 13 held to be asserted. Has 116 backward citations and 9 forward citations, and an AmberScore value of 5.0. Claim 1 reads:

1. A data processing device, comprising memory storing a domain name server (DNS) proxy module that intercepts DNS requests sent by a client and, for each intercepted DNS request, performs the steps of:

(i) determining whether the intercepted DNS request corresponds to a secure server;

(ii) when the intercepted DNS request does not correspond to a secure server, forwarding the DNS request to a DNS function that returns an IP address of a nonsecure computer, and

(iii) when the intercepted DNS request corresponds to a secure server, automatically initiating an encrypted channel between the client and the secure server.

4) US7921211 was filed in 2007. Claims 36, 37, 47, 51 held to be asserted. This patent has 71 backward citations and 4 forward citations, and an AmberScore value of 1.1. Claim 36 reads

36: A non-transitory machine-readable medium comprising instructions executable in a domain name service system, the instructions comprising code for:

• connecting the domain name service system to a communication network;
• storing a plurality of domain names and corresponding network addresses;
• receiving a query for a network address;
• and indicating in response to the query whether the domain name service system supports establishing a secure communication link.

These patents were acquired by VirnetX by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) in an arrangement that allows for the additional payment of revenue back to SAIC.

About the affirmed Apple judgement

The judgement describes why the court thought that Apple infringed these four patents, and interested readers can read these reasons in the judgement. However, as network patent analysts, we were more interested in the reasons why the judge found the patent to be valid.

In their arguments against validity, Apple referred to a 1996 Publication by Takahiro Kiuchi, which they claimed to anticipate every claim of the asserted patents. The judge came to the view that this reference was not enabling, i.e. not allowing 'one of ordinary skill in the art to make the invention without undue experimentation'.

This Kiruchi reference appears to be C-HTTP-the development of a secure, closed HTTP-based network on the Internet, which refers to a system for communicating between closed groups of institutions of the internet. Of note, this reference refers to closed network rather the internet network discussed by the VirnetX patents.

What potential prior art can AmberScope identify?

This analysis has shown the arguments against the validity of this patent to date have been based on:

• Boden, (US6330562) in view of Risley (US6332158). Boden discloses a Virtual Private Network, but not linking this to a DNS address for an IP address. Risley discloses a domain name lookup system, but does not refer to this to set up a VPN.
• Kiruchi's article on ;">C-HTTP-the development of a secure, closed HTTP-based network on the Internet, which refers to a system for communicating between closed groups of institutions of the internet.

One can presume that the lawyers for Apple et al would have done a thorough job of looking for prior art going into litigation, and the absence of knock-out prior art during litigation suggested that none may exist, or if it does exist, is very hard to find. Regardless, we were curious to see what additional light AmberScope could add to this analysis.

The easiest means of looking for prior art when using AmberScope is to start with the patent(s) being litigated. In this case, unlike many other case studies we have published, searching for prior art from the litigated patent was not successful - but remember that this patent has defeated the best of Apple's and Microsoft's lawyers.

So we tried some other options. We started AmberScope searches based on the patents discussed by the examiner for the '135 patent, namely Boden (US6330562) and Risley (US6332158). We also found an Apple patent that referred to video telephony, and performed a search from there. Again, no strong prior art was found.

The next option was one recommended in a previous blog, namely to use AmberScope to explore the connections to patents identified in a more traditional keyword search using the PatentLens patent search engine, using the following search query:

(("domain name server" or DNS) in fulltext) AND (("virtual private network" or VPN) in fulltext)

The results were then ordered by their date of publication. #6 on the list was WO19980230808 Communication systems architecture to MCI Communications (now owned by Verizon) and which has a priority date of 1996. This patent also has the family members US5867494, US5867495 and and US6690654 (and the earliest publication date for the family being June 1998, for the Australian family member AU199856867)

And in fact, this patent discloses many elements of the VirnetX patents:

• Establishment of virtual private networks (column 101 of US5867495)
• Identification of IP addresses from a domain name service (column 195)
• Encrypted communications (column 82).

So this patent by itself is helpful. But the patent becomes even more helpful if used as the basis for an AmberScope search, as one of the 'ghost patents' (highly ranked but not directly connected patents) found is US5999525 (1996) for a "Method for video telephony over a hybrid network".

US5999525 ('525) also has disclosures of possible relevance to the VirnetX patents, including

The user......connects the computer to an Internet Protocol (IP) network..starts an IP telephony software protocol system....The message contains IP address identifying the connection...computer or virtual private network (column 105) and "The domain name server will distribute calls amongst several locations via a lookup table (column 258)

So between these two MCI patents, we have may have discovered some prior art, providing of course that the filing and publication dates meet the applicable US laws on what constitutes a prior art document. The MCI patents could also potentially lead to other prior art filed or published by the same company or inventors.

Citation connections to Microsoft, Citrix and Cisco patents

Despite the apparent similarity between the VirnetX and MCI patents, and the alleged similarity to Apple's Facetime product, there are few citation connections between these patents.

For example:

• The leading VirnetX patent, US6502135, has no citation connections to either MCI or Apple patents (or even Siemens patents).
• The possibly most relevant MCI patent, US5999525, has no citation linkages to either a Virnetx or a SAIC patent. There was one citation connection however to an Apple patent, being US5561670 for a Method and apparatus for operating a multicast system on an unreliable network - which is more focused on compensating for the effects of signal quality than creating a virtual private network.

Connections to Microsoft, Citrix and Cisco patents.

While there were no citation connections to Apple patents from the VirnetX '135 patent, there were however connections to patent filed by Microsoft, IBM, Citrix and Cisco

In this diagram:

• Red patents are filed or owned by VirnetX
• Green patents are filed by Microsoft - and appear to form into a cluster, unlike the majority of patents filed by the following three companies.
• Blue patents by IBM
• Purple patents by Cisco
• Orange patents by Citrix

Of note, the leading patent in the Microsoft cluster is US7054774 (filed 2003, AmberScore value 6.8), for Midstream determination of varying bandwidth availability, which as suggested by the title is concerned with bandwidth management.

The other applicants were not nearly as clustered. Of note, their leading patents were

• IBM - US5805801 (1997, Amberscore 9.7) is for System and method for detecting and preventing security, and specifically is concerned with blocking known suspect addresses from campus networks
• Cisco - US6243749 (1998, AmberScore 7.0) Dynamic network address updating, and is concerned with updating domain name services
• Citrix - US7706266 (2007, AmberScore 1.3) Systems and methods of providing proxy-based quality of service,and which is also concerned with bandwidth management.

None of these patents appear to be directly related to virtual private networks.

Conclusions of citation analysis

Citation connections are sometimes used to identify or predict patent infringement, and with some success. In this particular case, there were no identified citation connections between VirnetX patents and relevant patents belonging to any of the companies they have successfully sued. Instead there appeared to be two completely separate networks of patents, being the two separate AmberScope networks shown above.

This could be for one of four most likely reasons:

• The allegedly infringing companies were infringing on the VirnetX patent, but had not filed any patents covering the technology they were infringing with
• None of the patent examiners for later patents filed to cover this technology by Apple in this area had noticed any similarities between the later patents and the VirnetX patents. This is possible, but unlikely if such Apple filings exist.
• Despite being a generally accepted tool, citation analysis simply failed in this case. Patent lawyers are often quick to point out that at the end of the day it is the patent claims that ultimately matters, and of course they are right. The role of citation analysis instead is to identify patents that appear to be dominant in their space - and therefore may contain claims that read onto valuable technologies in their space,
• The alleged infringers may have been correct in their post trial assertions that the VirnetX patents were either invalid or not infringed. It should be noted that the infringements were litigated in the Eastern District of Texas, which has a reputation for being friendly towards patent owners.

At this point in time, it is not clear which of these explanation are the most likely.

Relative dominance of the patents in the centre of the two networks

Another way of characterising the two networks discussed above to look at the relative dominance of the patents of the two patents we are comparing, namely the '135 VirnetX patent and the '525 MCI patent. Each sits in the centre of the network - it is worthwhile considering how these two patents compare to those patents directly. In particular we can ask for each patent

• What is its AmberScore value?
• How does this AmberScore value compared to the patents it is directly connected to, both forward and backward connections?

The results of this analysis are shown in the two tables below. The first table lists the patents directly connected to the '135 Virnetx patent, and with higher AmberScore values. The VirnetX patent has an AmberScore value of 12.3, which was enough to put it into 9th position in this list (and which is about 8 times greater than the median AmberScore of 1.6 for all patents directly connected to this patent).

The same table for the MCI patent is shown below. The MCI patent has an AmberScore value of 21.8, which was enough to put it into 3rd position in this list (and which is about 14 times greater than the median AmberScore of 1.5 for all patents directly connected to this patent).

Another means of comparing these patents is to consider the forward citation age profiles, as shown below.

These two tables and this figure help to put the leading VirnetX patent into perspective. It has some relative dominance, but are far from the most dominant patent in its local network.

Conclusions

This review has considered a half billion dollar (and counting) quartet of patent owned by VirnetX, and successfully asserted against Siemens, Apple and Microsoft for their video telephony applications. It shows:

• The asserted claims for the four patents all claim a similar invention
• The listed prior art for this patent does not appear to take into account a series of patents filed by MCI Communications for video telephony, where these patents disclose similar features to that disclosed by the VirnetX patents
• There are no citation linkages between the VirnetX patents and any patents filed by Apple, or MCI
• There is however a series of citation linkages between the VirnetX patents and patents filed by Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and Citrix.
• The leading VirnetX patent, US6502135, sits in 9th position in its network and has an AmberScore value 8 times the median value for all of its connected patents. This contrasts with the closest prior art patent found, US59999525, which sits in 3 place in a list of connected patents, and has an AmberScore of about 14 times the median for this network.

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.

On Jan 13 Florian Mueller, @FOSSpatents, wrote a blog post on the preliminary ITC ruling Motorola - Apple covering three patents, "including a strategically important one".

Having published an extensive report on the Smartphone Patent Wars in March 2012 (complimentary download available now) of course we were keen to understand how Network Patent Analysis (NPA™), which we had applied in the report, had ranked these patents by their strategic dominance or relative value. 

Florian Mueller writes "Whatever the reason for picking only three patents might have been, I believe two of those are less important than the third. The less important ones are U.S. Patent No. 5,379,430 on an "object-oriented system locator system" (yes, "system" appears twice in the title) and U.S. Patent No. 7,812,828 on an "ellipse fitting for multi-touch surfaces". The '828 patent is one of many patents Apple is asserting against Samsung in the United States, but it isn't nearly as essential to Apple's litigation strategy as another patent at issue in this preliminary ITC ruling and in use against Samsung in Apple's federal lawsuit in California: U.S. Patent No. 7,663,607 on a "multipoint touchscreen". The '607 patent is the broadest touchscreen-related hardware patent Apple has, and if the courts interpreted it as broadly as Apple would like them to, it would be extremely hard to work around."

So what did we find? The '607 "multi-touchscreen" patent referred to as a 'strategically important patent' was ranked as the single most dominant/ highest ranked patent in our analysis of the top  7,100 Smartphone patents, both within the technology cluster we identified as the "Touchscreen Cluster", as well as the overall Smartphone patent landscape. 

The '828 patent "Ellipse fitting for multi-touch surfaces", asserted by Motorola against Apple, and Apple against Samsung, ranked 9th in our report. (See the table to the left or report for further reference)

The only missing patent number of the three mentioned above was U.S. Patent No. 5,379,430 – which came in #361 in our ranking. This patent was regarded as ‘less important’ by FOSSpatents.

It is a great and encouraging result to have a strong alignment between our analysis and Florian’s analysis regarding the top ranked patent in the smartphone wars. 

Network Patent Analysis (NPA™) has been previously used to review an earlier hybrid car patent allegation against Toyota, where we were able to show how NPA™ patent analysis provided results consistent with litigation outcomes. The patent in question was ranked 2nd in our list of 60,000 hybrid car patents.