VERIZON MEDIA INC.

Patent Trials and Appeals BoardApr 22, 2021

2021001809 (P.T.A.B. Apr. 22, 2021)

UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE United States Patent and Trademark Office Address: COMMISSIONER FOR PATENTS P.O. Box 1450 Alexandria, Virginia 22313-1450 www.uspto.gov APPLICATION NO. FILING DATE FIRST NAMED INVENTOR ATTORNEY DOCKET NO. CONFIRMATION NO. 14/729,614 06/03/2015 Maria Zhang 085804.118300 9970 76058 7590 04/22/2021 VERIZON MEDIA INC. C/O GREENBERG TRAURIG, LLP MET LIFE BUILDING 200 PARK AVENUE NEW YORK, NY 10166 EXAMINER MPAMUGO, CHINYERE ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER 3621 NOTIFICATION DATE DELIVERY MODE 04/22/2021 ELECTRONIC Please find below and/or attached an Office communication concerning this application or proceeding. The time period for reply, if any, is set in the attached communication. Notice of the Office communication was sent electronically on above-indicated "Notification Date" to the following e-mail address(es): cordesp@gtlaw.com mendozae@gtlaw.com njdocket@gtlaw.com PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07) UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE ____________ BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD ____________ Ex parte MARIA ZHANG, XUE WU, QICHU LU, and BILL SHAPIRO ____________ Appeal 2021-001809 Application 14/729,614 Technology Center 3600 ____________ Before MURRIEL E. CRAWFORD, HUBERT C. LORIN, and AMEE A. SHAH, Administrative Patent Judges. SHAH, Administrative Patent Judge. DECISION ON APPEAL STATEMENT OF THE CASE Pursuant to 35 U.S.C. § 134(a), the Appellant1 appeals from the Examiner’s final decision to reject claims 1–9 and 11–20. We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b). We REVERSE. 1 We use the word “Appellant” to refer to “applicant” as defined in 37 C.F.R. § 1.42. The Appellant identifies the real party in interest as Oath Inc. Appeal Br. 2. Appeal 2021-001809 Application 14/729,614 2 CLAIMED SUBJECT MATTER The Appellant’s invention “relates generally to improving the performance of content providing and hosting server systems and/or platforms by modifying the capabilities and enabling non-native functionality to such systems and/or platforms for breaking news detection and personalized delivery.” Spec. ¶ 2. More particularly, the invention relates to “systems and methods for detecting breaking or trending news stories from social media activity, and alerting users to such news stories via personalized message delivery” by “leverag[ing] the explosion of social data, expert knowledge and user feedback, all available on-line, to determine breaking news stories, which are then delivered to users in a personalized manner specific to each user.” Id. ¶ 3. Claims 1, 11, and 20 are the independent claims on appeal. Claim 1 is illustrative of the subject matter on appeal and is reproduced below (with added lettered bracketing for reference): 1. A method comprising: [(a)] determining, via a computing device, a trusted news source from a plurality of news sources, said trust determination based on a determination that the trusted news source communicates newsworthy content via a social media platform, said trusted news source having an associated framing set comprising information associating the trusted news source with a content type; [(b)] determining, via the computing device, a plurality of trusted secondary news sources based on the framing set of the trusted news source, said secondary trust determination comprising parsing messages sent by the secondary news sources and identifying content in said messages that matches the framing set information at or above a threshold; Appeal 2021-001809 Application 14/729,614 3 [(c)] analyzing, via the computing device over a network, a plurality of new messages communicated by the trusted secondary news sources, and based on said analysis, detecting a topic commonly mentioned in at least a predetermined number of the new messages; [(d)] identifying, via the computing device over the network, a social media message respectively communicated by a plurality of users; [(e)] filtering, via the computing device, the social media messages communicated by the plurality of users; [(f)] identifying, based on said filtering of the social media messages communicated by the plurality of users, via the computing device, a message subset, each message in the message subset comprising content associated with a common event, each message in the message subset being associated with the detected topic and communicated during a predetermined time window that commences upon the detection of the topic commonly mentioned in at least the predetermined number of new messages; [(g)] analyzing, via the computing device, user data of users on a social media platform, said user data providing indications of online and real-world activity performed by the user, said analysis comprising parsing said user data based on said content of the message subset; [(h)] determining, via the computing device, based on said analysis, a set of users to be interested in said detected topic; [(i)] generating, via the computing device, a new message serving as a breaking news content message, said new message comprising at least said content of the message subset; and [(j)] communicating, via the computing device over a network, the new message to said set of interested users. Appeal Br. 15–16 (Claims App.). Appeal 2021-001809 Application 14/729,614 4 REFERENCES The prior art references relied upon by the Examiner are: Name Reference Date Krishnan et al. (“Krishnan”) US 2016/0028840 A1 Jan. 28, 2016 Magdy US 2016/0085869 A1 Mar. 24, 2016 Tsabourakis et al. (“Papadopoulos”)2 EP 2 937 824 A1 Oct. 28, 2015 THE REJECTION Claims 1–6, 8, 9, 11–16, and 18–20 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as unpatentable over Magdy and Papadopoulos. Claims 7 and 17 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as unpatentable over Magdy, Papadopoulos, and Krishnan. OPINION We agree with the Appellant that the Examiner does not adequately show how the prior art renders obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art determining a set of users to be interested in said detected topic based on the analysis of user data, as recited in limitations (g) and (h) of claim 1 and similarly recited in claims 11 and 20. See Appeal Br. 7–8; Reply Br. 5. The Examiner finds, in relevant part, that Magdy teaches analyzing user data of users and determining from that analysis, a set of users interested in the determined topic by identifying tweets that are relevant to a 2 The inventors are listed as Nikolaos Tsabourakis, Nikolaos Sarris, and Aris Papadopoulos (EP 2 937 824 A9, pub. Dec. 2, 2015). However, as both the Examiner and the Appellant refer to the publication by the third listed inventor, Papadopoulos, we do as well. Appeal 2021-001809 Application 14/729,614 5 particular Arab region using filtering approaches and incorporating a query formulation module that receives ranked key words and generates a search query that searches objects corresponding to the key words. Final Act. 4–5 (citing Magda ¶¶ 59, 68, 69); see also Ans. 5. We do not see where or how Magdy discloses analyzing user data of social media users and determining a set of users based on that analysis. Magdy discloses, in relevant part, a method for “SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT ANALYSIS AND OUTPUT.” Magdy, Title. The method comprises “identifying a subset of relevant social media objects from the set of [stored] social media objects” that each comprise at least one word, by: storing at least one content article, extracting at least one keyword from at least one content article, ranking each extracted keyword with an importance value, searching each of the social media objects for each extracted keyword with an importance value that is higher than a predetermined value, and adding each social media object which comprises an extracted keyword with an importance value that is higher than the predetermined value to a subset of relevant social media objects. The method further comprises outputting the subset. Id. at Abstr. Microblogs are filtered to identify microblogs relevant to a user. See id. ¶¶ 59, 67. “The content output on the social news portal is composed preferably entirely of relevant social media objects. A user can therefore view the social news portal to be provided with up to date information on topics that are of interest to the user.” Id. ¶ 67. “One example of an embodiment of the invention which is known as TweetMogaz (www.tweetmogaz.com) is running over a collection of Arabic tweets,” by collecting millions of Arabic tweets per day, pre-processing each tweet’s text “using normalization techniques for social Arabic text and indexed using Apache Solr.” Id. ¶ 68. Results of a search enabled by specifying a Appeal 2021-001809 Application 14/729,614 6 query and time span are presented in a real-time comprehensive report about political news in a time period, such as the past 24 hours, for countries in the Arabic region. Id. For example, a “[u]ser can see examples of these days [with hot news] by browsing archived daily reports on the website.” Id. In this way, Magdy’s “method for retrieving and filtering relevant microblogs . . . is applied to follow political news in countries in the Arabic region such as the [sic] Egypt and Syria” and “is applicable to other regions and other news categories.” Id. ¶ 69. At best, Magdy discloses filtering and identifying content for users of a particular region or for a particular news category. The Examiner appears to equate filtering and processing “Arabic tweets” with analyzing users’ data and using that filtering to determine users interested in news of the Arabic region. Final Act. 5–6; Ans. 5. However, we do not see, and the Examiner does not adequately explain, how or where Magdy discloses or teaches that users’ data are analyzed by parsing social media data based on the content, as opposed to the language, to determine a set of users for the specific region or category, as opposed to determining information for a particular region or category. See Reply Br. 5. Thus, we do not sustain the Examiner’s rejection under 35 U.S.C. § 103 of independent claims 1, 11, and 20 and of dependent claims 2–6, 8, 9, 12–16, 18, and 19. We also do not sustain the Examiner’s rejection under 35 U.S.C. § 103 of dependent claims 7 and 17 as we do not understand the Examiner’s reliance on Krishnan to remedy the deficiency in the Examiner’s rejection of independent claims 1 and 11. Appeal 2021-001809 Application 14/729,614 7 CONCLUSION The Examiner’s decision to reject claims 1–9 and 11–20 is not sustained. In summary: Claim(s) Rejected 35 U.S.C. § Reference(s)/ Basis Affirmed Reversed 1–6, 8, 9, 11–16, 18–20 103 Magdy, Papadopoulos 1–6, 8, 9, 11–16, 18–20 7, 17 103 Magdy, Papadopoulos, Krishnan 7, 17 Overall Outcome 1–9, 11–20 REVERSED