by: David Nickelson, Director of Research

Editor’s note: Limestone is a SaaS patent research platform that has been built by practicing patent professionals (and technologists) here at Techson. It has been vetted by Techson’s own, most experienced researchers and our customers - across thousands of previously completed projects with an extremely high success rate.

Last week in an anticipated decision, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued their ruling in Realtime Data, LLC v. Iancu dealing with a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) decision invalidating claims of US 6,597,812. The ruling was notable because the invalidation involved an obviousness rejection without a motivation to combine. 

Dennis Crouch of the PatentlyO Blog provided a nice summary of the case for those interested in learning more of the background.

This case provides another opportunity to demonstrate why our patent research platform Limestone should become a de facto standard in identifying potentially invalidating prior art references.  Internally here at Techson, we like to lovingly say, “it should be malpractice not to use Limestone” in the research stage of a validity evaluation like this.

We ran the ’812 patent through our instant validity algorithm in Limestone (one input, one click of the mouse and 60-90 seconds later we had constructed a small corpus of 86 patent families that Limestone suggests are worthy of review. Our 86 Limestone results included both references, US 4,929,946 and US 4,558,302, that the PTAB and CAFC relied upon in the invalidity determination.  Neither reference was provided by the applicant or located and considered by the examiner during prosecution.

We don’t know to what lengths or expense the parties went to in researching and uncovering these references, and we don’t know what other relevant references Limestone produced that may have been of interest to the parties or the courts had they been produced during the research phase of the investigation. 

However, we do know that our research team would have uncovered and reported both of these prior art references in less than 2 hours, and this would have saved 80%-90% of the time that would have been required by any other professional research group to uncover using traditional research tools, databases, and techniques. 

Limestone currently uses a dozen tunable algorithms (with dozens more in the works) to surface the likeliest references for patent professionals to efficiently review to find their best answers.

Instant and highly accurate “corpus building” is what sets Limestone apart and continues to amaze us. Rather than sifting through tens or hundreds of thousands of patents with unbearable amounts of time-wasting false positives, we’re able to quickly hone in on high yield references for detailed analysis, resulting in favorable outcomes for our clients over and over.

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