Ex Parte Dean et al

Patent Trial and Appeal Board

Mar 18, 2014

10389688 (P.T.A.B. Mar. 18, 2014)

UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
United States Patent and Trademark Office
Address: COMMISSIONER FOR PATENTS
P.O. Box 1450
Alexandria, Virginia 22313-1450
www.uspto.gov
APPLICATION NO. FILING DATE FIRST NAMED INVENTOR ATTORNEY DOCKET NO. CONFIRMATION NO.
10/389,688 03/14/2003 Jeffrey A. Dean Google-31/CON2
(GP-064-02
2509
82402 7590 03/19/2014
Straub & Pokotylo
788 Shrewsbury Avenue
Tinton Falls, NJ 07724
EXAMINER
PADMANABHAN, KAVITA
ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER
2121
MAIL DATE DELIVERY MODE
03/19/2014 PAPER
Please find below and/or attached an Office communication concerning this application or proceeding.
The time period for reply, if any, is set in the attached communication.
PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07)
UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
____________

BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD
____________

Ex parte JEFFREY A. DEAN, GEORGES R. HARIK,
and PAUL BUCHHEIT
____________

Appeal 2011-007455
Application 10/389,688
Technology Center 2100
____________

Before JOSEPH F. RUGGIERO, JASON V. MORGAN, and
MICHAEL J. STRAUSS, Administrative Patent Judges.

RUGGIERO, Administrative Patent Judge.

DECISION ON APPEAL
STATEMENT OF THE CASE
Appellants appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 134(a) from the Final Rejection
of all of the pending claims 1-31 and 39-43. Claims 32-38 have been
canceled. We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b).
We affirm.
Rather than reiterate the arguments of Appellants and the Examiner,
we refer to the Appeal Brief (filed Nov. 9, 2010), the Answer (mailed Jan.
31, 2011), and the Reply Brief (filed Mar. 30, 2011) for the respective
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details. We have considered in this decision only those arguments
Appellants actually raised in the Briefs. Any other arguments which
Appellants could have made but chose not to make in the Briefs are deemed
to be waived. See 37 C.F.R. § 41.37(c)(1)(vii).

Appellants’ Invention
Appellants’ invention relates to targeted advertising in which targeting
information is identified by extracting topics or concepts, such as relevant
queries, from a Web page to which an advertisement is linked. See
generally Abstract.

Claim 1 is illustrative of the claimed invention and reads as follows:

1. A computer-implemented method to assist advertisers by
generating serving constraints for an advertisement, the computer-
implemented method comprising:
a) identifying, by an ad serving system including at least one
computer on a network, a target document using information
provided, via an advertiser interface of the ad serving system, by an
advertiser entering or managing information related to an
advertisement;
b) generating, by the ad serving system, concepts from information
associated with the target document;
c) storing, by the ad serving system, at least one of the concepts in
association with the advertisement as one or more serving constraints
to be used to target the serving of the advertisement, wherein the at
least one of the concepts stored in association with the advertisement
had not been previously associated with the advertisement as a
serving constraint; and
d) later using at least one of the concepts stored in association with the
advertisement as one or more serving constraints to constrain the
serving of the advertisement with respect to a plurality of documents,
the plurality of documents not being limited to the target document.
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The Examiner’s Rejections

The Examiner’s Answer cites the following prior art references:
Sheth US 6,311,194 B1 Oct. 30, 2001
Hasegawa US 2003/0083937 A1 May 1, 2003
(filed Nov. 1, 2001)
Graham US 6,804,659 B1 Oct. 12, 2004
(filed Jan. 14, 2000)
Wieser WO 01/44992 A1 June 21, 2001

Claims 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 12, 15-17, 19, 20, 24, 27, 28, 31, and 39-43 stand
rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Wieser in view
of Graham.
Claims 3, 6, 7, 13, 14, 18, 25, 26, 29, and 30 stand rejected under 35
U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Wieser in view of Graham and
Hasegawa.
1

Claims 9-11 and 21-23 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as
being unpatentable over Wieser in view of Graham and Sheth.

ANALYSIS
Claims 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 12, 16, 17, 19, 20, 24, 28, 31, 39, 40, 42, and 43
Appellants’ arguments, with respect to the Examiner’s obviousness
rejection based on the combination of Wieser and Graham of independent
claims 1 and 16, initially focus on the alleged deficiency of Wieser in

1
The Examiner incorrectly included dependent claims 7 and 30 in the list of
claims subject to the rejection based on the combination of Wieser and
Graham. Based on the analysis in the Answer, we presume the Examiner
intended to include claims 7 and 30, which are dependent, respectively, on
claims 6 and 29, in the group of claims subject to the rejection based on the
combination of Wieser, Graham, and Hasegawa. We treat this omission as
harmless error.
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teaching or suggesting the claimed feature of storing concepts generated
from a target document in association with an advertisement as a serving
constraint used to target the serving of the advertisement. According to
Appellants, Wieser uses the content of the advertisement itself in a
contextual matching operation with content on a web page to target the
advertisement. App. Br. 16-17; Reply Br. 4-5. In Appellants’ view,
therefore, Wieser does not teach or suggest using concepts extracted from a
target document and stored as serving constraints with the advertisement to
be served to the target document. Id.
We do not agree with Appellants. Our interpretation of the disclosure
of Wieser coincides with that of the Examiner. As explained by the
Examiner, Wieser teaches analyzing a target document for keywords,
performing the same analysis on the advertisement, and matching the
advertisement to the target document based on contextual information. Ans.
13 (citing Wieser, page 5, lines 22-27). The advertisement is stored with the
document, i.e., “in association with the document,” and includes contextual
information that constrains the serving of the advertisement with the target
document. Ans. 13 (citing Wieser, page 11, lines 7-10).
Although Appellants contend (App. Br. 16-17; Reply Br. 4-5) that
Wieser does not use serving constraints that were generated from a target
document and then associated with an advertisement, there is no claim
language which precludes using the content of an advertisement along with a
target document in a matching operation to generate advertisement serving
constraints which are stored with the advertisement as in Wieser. We also
find Appellants’ arguments (App. Br. 17) unpersuasive of error in the
Examiner’s determination that Graham’s teaching of constraining the
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serving of an advertisement to a plurality of documents not limited to a
target document would have been recognized as an obvious enhancement to
the targeted advertisement system of Wieser. Ans. 14 (citing Graham, col.
8, ll. 1-13).
For the above reasons, we sustain the Examiner’s 35 U.S.C. § 103(a)
rejection of independent claims 1 and 16, as well as the rejection of
dependent claims 2, 4, 5, 8, 12, 17, 19, 20, 24, 28, 31, 39, 40, 42, and 43 not
separately argued by Appellants.

Claims 15, 27, and 41
We also sustain the Examiner’s obviousness rejection, based on the
combination of Wieser and Graham, of independent claim 15, as well as the
rejection of dependent claims 27 and 41 not argued with particularity by
Appellants.
2
Appellants contend that the Examiner erred in concluding that
Wieser teaches the claimed feature of providing suggested server constraints
to an advertiser to manually accept or reject. App. Br. 18; Reply Br. 7-8.
We find no error, however, in the Examiner’s determination that
Wieser’s teaching of optimizing contextual matching results by revising
contextual matching criteria and business rules corresponds to the claimed
manual acceptance or rejection of suggested constraints. Ans. 14 (citing
Wieser, page 7, lines 16-28, page 18, line 24-page 19, line 1, page 19, lines
18-26, and page 25, line 29-page 26, line 1. While Wieser does suggest that
business rules are applied to the front end of the contextual analysis, i.e.,
before matching concepts are generated as argued by Appellants (Reply Br.

2
Although Appellants refer (App. Br. 18; Reply Br. 8) to claim 27 as an
independent claim, claim 27 is dependent upon independent claim 16.
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7), Wieser also suggests that business rules are applied after the contextual
analysis to refine the contextual matches. Weiser, page 19, line 5 and page
26, line 2.

Claims 3, 6, 7, 13, 14, 18, 25, 26, 29, and 30

We also sustain the Examiner’s rejection of dependent claims 3, 6, 7
13, 14, 18, 25, 26, 29, and 30 in which Hasegawa has been applied to the
Wieser/Graham combination to address the advertisement linking feature of
the rejected claims. Initially, we find Appellants’ arguments (App. Br. 19-
20; Reply Br. 9-10) unpersuasive of error in the Examiner’s determination
that Wieser’s target document and advertisement are distinct entities. Ans.
15. Further, contrary to Appellants’ contentions (App. Br. 21-23; Reply Br.
9-10), we find no error in the Examiner’s determination of the obviousness
to the ordinarily skilled artisan of incorporating Hasegawa’s teaching of
advertisements that contain links to web sites in the Wieser/Graham
combination resulting in the identification of a target document or web page
based on a link in an advertisement. Ans. 15-16.

Claims 9-11 and 21-23
The Examiner’s obviousness rejection of dependent claims 9-11 and
21-23 based on the combination of Wieser, Graham, and Sheth is also
sustained. We find unpersuasive Appellants’ argument (App. Br. 26) that
Sheth is directed to the return of search queries associated with a particular
user, not a target document as claimed. As explained by the Examiner, it is
the combination of Sheth’s teaching (col. 2. ll. 51-58, col. 4, ll. 44-46, col. 7,
ll. 27-32) of structure based information linking applied to the target
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document teachings of Wieser and Graham that is relied upon as a basis for
the obviousness rejection. Ans. 17.

CONCLUSION OF LAW
Based on the analysis above, we conclude that the Examiner did not
err in rejecting claims 1-31 and 39-43 for obviousness under 35 U.S.C.
§ 103(a).

DECISION
We affirm the Examiner’s decision rejecting claims 1-31 and 39-43
under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a).
No time period for taking any subsequent action in connection with
this appeal may be extended under 37 C.F.R. § 1.136(a)(1)(iv) (2011).

AFFIRMED

ELD