Takeaway: The Board refused to incorporate limitations from the specification into the claims where the narrow construction urged by Patent Owner was not provided in the specification with reasonable clarity, deliberateness, and precision.

In its Final Written Decision, the Board concluded that all challenged claims, claims 1-27, of the ’262 Patent are unpatentable.  Petitioner had filed a Petition seeking inter partes review of claims 1, 5-10, 14-19, and 23-27 based on a ground of anticipation by Chase and claims 2-4, 11-13, and 20-22 based on a ground of obviousness over Chase and Scharber. The ’262 Patent relates to a method, computer readable storage medium, and system for dynamic distributed data caching.

The Board began its analysis with claim construction, indicating a number of terms that it interpreted in its Decision on Institution. Patent Owner only challenged the Board’s construction of “master.” In its Preliminary Response, Patent Owner had argued that “master” should be construed to mean “a device that determines membership of a cache community.” The Board disagreed and determined that the broadest reasonable interpretation of “master” is “a peer that provides administrative support to other peers.” In its Response, Patent Owner argued that there is “considerable support in the specification for the master’s role in determining whether to admit (and thus also whether to deny) a client membership in the cache community.” However, the Board was not persuaded that the Specification supported Patent Owner’s position that the construction should be modified to include this additional feature that was not recited in the claims. Patent Owner further argued dictionary definitions, and argued that construing “master” without a connotation of control would read it out of the claims. The Board was not persuaded by either of these arguments. Accordingly, the Board maintained its claim construction of all terms interpreted in its Decision on Institution.

The Board then tuned to the anticipation and obviousness grounds asserted by Petitioner, which the Board found persuasive. Patent Owner’s only argument against each ground was based on the claims construction that the Board refused to adopt. Accordingly, the Board concluded that Petitioner had demonstrated, by a preponderance of the evidence, that claims 1-27 of the ’262 patent are unpatentable on the basis of the anticipation and obviousness grounds presented in the Petition.

Reloaded Games, Inc. v. Parallel Networks LLC, IPR2014-00139
Paper 32: Final Written Decision
Dated: May 14, 2015
Patents: 7,730,262 B2
Before: Kristen L. Droesch, Brian J. McNamara, and Hyun J. Jung
Written by: Jung
Related Proceedings: IPR2014-00136