After years of hype, patent troll Vringo demolished on appeal

Lycos founder Michael Mauldin shows off his spider tattoo, featuring the seven numbers of his 1997 patent for "skimming" digital audio and video files. Mauldin's patent was not one of the patents used in the lawsuit against Google.

Credit: Anirudh Kohl

That hype will die now, and the result will resonate beyond Vringo's case. By dismantling two patents from a once-famed search engine on this basis, the majority has sent a message that more Federal Circuit judges are willing to invalidate patents following the results of this year's most important Supreme Court patent case, Alice v. CLS Bank. That opinion, which was cited in a concurring opinion, said that obvious ideas—especially ones that don't amount to more than an idea surrounded with computer jargon—shouldn't get patents.

The harsh result for Vringo was bad enough that at least three other patent troll stocks also saw modest price drops.

Two judges found that the two patents, numbered 6,775,664 and 6,314,420, were invalid because the prior art, viewed as a whole, rendered them obvious.

"I/P Engine’s claimed invention is obvious as a matter of law because it simply combines content-based and collaborative filtering, two information filtering methods that were well-known in the art," stated the unsigned "per curiam" majority opinion.

Retaining a query for use in filtering was "entirely predictable and grounded in common sense," they wrote. Vringo lawyers further argued that earlier systems used "ranking" rather than "filtering," but the majority found that difference unconvincing.

A concurring opinion by Circuit Judge Haldane Mayer is more strongly worded.

Vringo's patents "simply recite the use of a generic computer to implement a well-known and widely practiced technique for organizing information," wrote Mayer. "If this determination had been made in the first instance as directed by the Supreme Court, unnecessary litigation, and nearly two weeks of trial and imposition on citizen jurors, could have been avoided."

Further, the "broad and sweeping reach" of the Vringo patents is "vastly disproportionate to their minimal disclosure," wrote Mayer.

Circuit Judge Raymond Chen dissented, writing that "the majority fails to accord sufficient deference to the jury’s findings of fact... We need something beyond the invocation of the phrase 'common sense' or 'simple logic' to demonstrate the reason to combine the prior art references in this case."

"The record does not suggest a benefit or rationale that would have caused a skilled artisan to use the query as part of collaborative filtering in 1998," wrote Chen, who joined the court last year after serving many years as a top lawyer at the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Vringo also sued four Google clients who used AdWords: AOL, Gannet Co., IAC Search & Media, and Target. Google handled the defense of the case for all parties.