Contemporary Display patent held unpatentable - would Ambercite have been able to find the knockout prior art?

Jan 15 2021 As according to Unified Patents, the US PTAB has published a final judgment finding that US patent US8863219 claiming a system for On screen television input management to be unpatentable over prior art.

As is often the case in litigation, there was a complex sequence of events that led to judgments both in relation to novelty and inventive step. But in this mix there was a '102' novelty judgment finding that the original claims 1 to 3 were invalid in the light of the previously uncited US patent application 2006/0064719 to Youden, titled Simultaneous video input display and selection system and method.

Ambercite prides itself on being able to find prior art missed by conventional searching. In this case, we know what prior art the examiner was able to find using conventional patent searching - this being the listed prior art for this case.

Is Ambercite able to find this and other potential prior art?

Yes is the answer. To demonstrate, I have entered US8863219 into the Ambercite search box, and set the date filter to match the prior date for this patent. The resulting search query looks like this:

As requested 50 patents are returned, being a combination of 10 ‘known’ (previously cited) patents, and also 40 ‘unknown’ (not previously cited) patents.

The top three results are shown below - but if you click on this image, you will see a full list of all 50 patents return. Note that some key terms have been highlighted.

Being a PTAB litigation case, we are mostly interested in new (‘unknown’) prior art that has not been cited against this patent before, so we will set up a filter to only show Unknown patents:

This gives us 40 patents to go through - which is a LOT fewer than the vast majority of conventional Boolean searches. And at Ambercite ranked in 45th position (35th out of 40 unknown patents) we find the Youden patent that was affirmed by the PTAB as a ‘102’ novelty destroying prior art document.

What about the other 39 unknown prior art documents that Ambercite found?

I don’t intend to go through these in detail, but some of them look pretty relevant, for example, the top-ranked by Ambercite patent US5583560 Method and apparatus for audio-visual interface for the selective display of listing information on a display. I do not know if these other unknown citations have been considered by the parties in this case.

So it is possible that further novelty destroying 102 documents exist. But regardless, it does not take very long to review these 40 patents, and to determine that the Youden patent is clearly relevant.

Do you want to test these features and benefits for yourself?

Ambercite offers free trials, but to get the most of this, please contact us for a demonstration. You can try either option via the links below: