Several weeks ago, I examined a patent litigation case between TiVo and TNS Media Research LLC, where TiVo accused TNS of infringing on its ‘Holy Grail’ patent, US patent ‘940. In this post, I focused primarily on the litigation of the case. This week, I will be delving further into the case and will be examining the predictability and obviousness of patents, particularly by looking at claim (1) of TiVo’s ad patent.
Claim (1) of TiVo’s ‘Holy Grail’ patent essentially discusses the means of data collection from clickstream, advertising, program and purchase data and the means used to analyze this data for an advertising platform. I personally believe that the description provided in the patent does not portray obviousness. This is because the large amount of data is processed by specially programmed TiVo computers, without relying on personal information, in order to provide the largest algorithmic return on investment through advertising.
This type of algorithmic analysis seems to me to be a concept that cannot obviously be copied without carefully looking at how TiVo analyzes its data. Obviousness can definitely play a major problem in many patent applications; in this case, the 10,000 hours of work TiVo invested into this single patent should prove that obviousness is not the problem behind this patent litigation case between TiVo and TNS. Ultimately, I believe that TNS should actually be under some sort of scrutiny because TiVo’s patent is in fact non-obvious and abstract. The court decision has still not been released, however I can confidently see TiVo winning this case.
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