Art+com Innovationpool Gmbh v. Google LLC

712 F. App'x 976
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
DecidedOctober 20, 2017
Docket2017-1016
StatusUnpublished
Cited by3 cases

This text of 712 F. App'x 976 (Art+com Innovationpool Gmbh v. Google LLC) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Art+com Innovationpool Gmbh v. Google LLC, 712 F. App'x 976 (Fed. Cir. 2017).

Opinion

O’Malley', Circuit Judge.

Art+Com Innovationpool GmbH (“Art+Com”) appeals the district court’s entry of judgment following a jury trial. The jury found that Appellee Google LLC (“Google”) did not infringe claims 1, 3, 14, and 28 (the “asserted claims”) of U.S. Patent No. RE44,550 (“the ’550 patent”), and that each-of the asserted claims is invalid as anticipated and/or obvious. The district court entered judgment consistent with these verdicts and denied Art+Corn’s renewed motion for judgment as a matter of law, finding that each is supported by substantial evidence.

Because we find that substantial evidence supports the jury’s conclusion that each of the asserted claims is invalid, we affirm, the district court’s denial of Art+Corn’s motions for judgment as a matter of law. In light of this conclusion, we need not and do not consider the judgment of noninfringement.

I. Background

Art+Com is the owner by assignment of the ’550 patent, titled “Method and Device for Pictorial Representation of Space-Related Data.” Broadly speaking, the ’550 patent is directed to methods for displaying geographic — i.e., topographic or meteorological — data, such as satellite images, to a user who has a selectable viewpoint, taking into account the user’s location and direction of view. The ’550 patent claims priority to a U.S. patent application filed on December 17, 1996. Accordingly, it is undisputed that the critical date for purposes of anticipation under 35 U.S.C. § 102(b) is December 17,1995.

Claim 1, on which asserted claims 3, 14, and 28 depend, recites the following:

1. A method of providing a pictorial representation of space-related data of a selectable object, the representation corresponding to a view of the object by an observer with a selectable location and a selectable direction of view comprising:
(a) providing a plurality of spatially distributed data sources for storing space-related data;
(b) determining a field of view including an area of the object to be represented through a selection of a distance of the observer to the object and an angle of view of the observer to the object;
(c) requesting data for the field of view from at least one of the plurality of spatially distributed data sources;
(d) centrally storing the data for the field of view;
(e) representing the data for the field of view in a pictorial representation having one or more sections;
(£) using a computer, dividing each of the one or more, sections having image resolutions below a desired image resolution into a plurality of smaller sections, requesting higher resolution space-related data for each of the smaller sections from at least one of the plurality of spatially distributed data sources, centrally storing the higher resolution space-related data, and representing the data for the field of view in the pictorial representation; and
(g) repeating step (f), dividing the sections into smaller sections, until every section has the desirpd image resolution or no higher’image resolution data is available.

’550 patent col. 10, ll. 16-44. 1 Throughout the trial, Google and its witnesses referred to the asserted claims as requiring “coarse-to-fine” zooming, in which the device iteratively “divides” parent nodes into at least two child nodes that point to higher resolution image data, then requests, stores, and displays the data for these child nodes until either the desired image resolution for each parent node is achieved or no higher image resolution data is available. See, e.g., Trial Tr. 1229 ll. 8-23, ECF Nos. 418-23.

Art+Com filed suit against Google in February 2014, alleging that Google’s “Google Earth, Version 7” and related software products infringe the asserted claims of the ’550 patent. Trial commenced on May 23, 2016, during which Google sought to prove that the invention was placed in public use prior to December 17, 1995, and that the ’550 patent, therefore, is invalid under § 102(b).

Google introduced several forms of evidence in support, of this effort. First, it called Stephen Lau as a witness, who testified that, while he was employed at the federally funded, not-for-profit company Stanford Re-search Institute (“SRI”), he helped develop SRI TerraVision, “an earth visualization application” that “used a co[arse-to-fine] algorithm to retrieve images [sic] data across the network from multiple servers.” Trial Tr. 1029 ll. 9-18. He further testified that SRI TerraVision was part of the “MAGIC project,” an “umbrella federally funded research project” that focused on terrain visualization. Id. at 1030 ll. 9-12, 1043 ll. 5-10. He also testified both that he wrote about 89 percent of the source code underlying SRI TerraVision and that the project was meant to be put into the public domain. Id. at 1030-32, 1151. Lau further testified that SRI Terra-Vision allowed a user to navigate around a two- or three-dimensional representation of a graphical area and to zoom in and out to different levels of detail, and described how SRI TerraVision drew its image data from a network of multiple servers spread across the country. Id. at 1034-35, 1051.

While Lau was on the stand, Google displayed a 1994 VHS tape in which the narrator walks the viewer through the operation of SRI TerraVision. J.A. 2565. In the tape, the narrator describes how a user can move from a low-resolution picture of a larger geographic area to a higher-resolution picture of a smaller geographic area using a “multi-resolution pyramid.” J.A. 2565, 3532-33. The narrator continues:

At each level of the resolution pyramid, groups of four tiles from the next higher resolution are averaged down into a single tile. Consequently, each level of the pyramid covers the entire terrain, but uses only a quarter as many tiles as the previous level. The pyramid is built layer by layer until the entire terrain is represented by a single tile....
But what if some of the tiles needed for a given view are not in local memory when they are needed for a display?.... Notice that, each time we click on the map, the image first seems out of focus, and then becomes clearer. What’s happening is that, when we first move to a new area, the high resolution tiles are not available in local memory, so Terra-Vision is forced to use lower resolution tiles. At the same time as the display is being processed, TerraVision is requesting higher resolution tiles from the server. As they arrive, TerraVision uses these higher resolution tiles, and the image becomes progressively better focused.

Id. Lau corroborated the narrator’s description of how SRI TerraVision operates.

Free access — add to your briefcase to read the full text and ask questions with AI

Related

Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
712 F. App'x 976, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/artcom-innovationpool-gmbh-v-google-llc-cafc-2017.