Ex Parte Brady et al

Patent Trial and Appeal Board

Oct 31, 2012

11138170 (P.T.A.B. Oct. 31, 2012)

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.
11/138,170 05/26/2005 Kenneth A. Brady JR. P2252US 8478
20792 7590 10/31/2012
MYERS BIGEL SIBLEY & SAJOVEC
PO BOX 37428
RALEIGH, NC 27627
EXAMINER
HUYNH, AN SON PHI
ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER
2426
MAIL DATE DELIVERY MODE
10/31/2012 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 KENNETH A. BRADY, Jr. and DAVID REICHERT
____________

Appeal 2010-006306
Application 11/138,170
Technology Center 2400
____________

Before MAHSHID D. SAADAT, DAVID M. KOHUT,
and LARRY J. HUME, Administrative Patent Judges.

SAADAT, Administrative Patent Judge.

DECISION ON APPEAL

Appellants appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 134(a) from the Examiner’s final
rejection of claims 1-3, 5-10, 12-15, and 17-23. Claims 4, 11, and 16 have
been canceled. We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b).
We affirm.
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STATEMENT OF THE CASE
Appellants’ Invention
Appellants’ invention relates to an in-flight entertainment (IFE)
system including display devices for viewing by passengers. The IFE
system uses an encryption system allowing transmission of the signal to
authorized devices (see generally Spec. ¶¶ [0007] – [0009]).
Claim 1 is illustrative of the invention and reads as follows:
1. A system for providing multimedia content to a passenger on an
aircraft, the system comprising:
a plurality of network clients including wireless
interfaces;
a local area network;
a content server connected to the local area network, the
content server communicating broadcast and on-demand
multimedia content to the plurality of network clients;
a cockpit interface connected to the local area network,
the cockpit interface streaming messages from a cockpit crew to
the plurality of network clients;
a wireless router connected to the local area network, the
wireless router establishing a wireless network for
communicating the broadcast and on- demand multimedia
content and the messages from a cockpit crew wirelessly with
the wireless interfaces of the plurality of network clients; and
a management unit connected to the local area network,
the management unit controlling the wireless router to turn off
the wireless network during a critical aircraft flight phase;
wherein each network client has a video display unit in a
position viewable from a seat of the aircraft passenger and each
network client is adapted to communicate with the local area
network through the wireless router;
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the system further comprising
an authentication server that assigns an encryption key to
the video display unit and to the content server, the content
server distributing the selected content to the network address
corresponding to the video display unit only if the encryption
key has been assigned to both the content server and the video
display unit;
wherein at least one of cockpit interface messages,
overhead video data, and overhead audio data is distributed
using a streaming network protocol that does not perform error
checking, while the selected content is distributed using a
guaranteed delivery protocol.
The Examiner’s Rejections
The Examiner relies on the following prior art in rejecting the claims:
Lipsanen US 2002/0059614 A1 May 16, 2002
Parrott US 2002/0062197 A1 May 23, 2002
Peace US 6,574,272 B1 Jun. 3, 2003
Sellars US 2003/0187799 A1 Oct. 2, 2003
Weinberger US 6,813,777 B1 Nov. 2, 2004
Veeck US 2005/0039208 A1 Feb. 17, 2005
Grosse US 2005/0210288 A1 Sep. 22, 2005

Claims 1, 2, 5-9, 12, 13, and 19-23 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C.
§ 103(a) as being unpatentable over Lipsanen, Weinberger, Sellars, Parrott,
and Peace. (See Ans. 4-24).
Claims 3 and 10 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being
unpatentable over Lipsanen, Weinberger, Sellars, Parrott, Peace, and Grosse.
(See Ans. 24-26).
Claims 14, 17, and 18 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as
being unpatentable over Lipsanen, Weinberger, Sellars, Peace, Veeck, and
Parrott. (See Ans. 26-31).
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Claim 15 stands rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being
unpatentable over Lipsanen, Weinberger, Sellars, Peace, Veeck, Parrott, and
Grosse. (See Ans. 31).
Appellants’ Contentions
Regarding the rejection of claim 1, Appellants do not dispute the
teachings of Lipsanen, Weinberger, and Parrott and merely focus their
arguments on the teachings of Sellars and Peace (App. Br. 14-18).
Appellants specifically contend that:
1. Paragraphs 65 and 66 of Sellars relate to a conduit through
which the requested license is obtained, which is not sufficient to show that
the encrypted license is assigned to the provider to further determine
whether to distribute the selected content (App. Br. 13-16).
2. While there is concern for security, there is no motivation for
the Examiner’s proposed combination because the disclosure of Sellars with
respect to the two-way communication with a content provider and
broadcasts by satellites is not relevant to the use in a passenger
entertainment system (App. Br. 16-17).
3. The relied-on portions of Peace describing “time critical data”
and “bulk data” do not disclose the claimed delineation of data and how
different elements of in-flight entertainment system require guaranteed
delivery in contrast with elements requiring use of protocol (App. Br. 17-
18).
With respect to the rejections of the remaining claims, Appellants
present no separate argument and rely on the arguments provided for claim
1, allowing those claims to fall with representative claim 1 (App. Br. 18-19).
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Issue on Appeal
Did the Examiner err in rejecting claim 1 as being obvious because
the combination of Lipsanen, Weinberger, Sellars, Parrott, and Peace fails to
teach or suggest the recited features?
ANALYSIS
We have reviewed the Examiner’s rejections in light of Appellants’
arguments that the Examiner has erred. We disagree with Appellants’
conclusions. We adopt as our own (1) the findings and reasons set forth by
the Examiner in the action from which this appeal is taken and (2) the
reasons set forth by the Examiner in the Examiner’s Answer (see Ans. 31-
35) in response to Appellants’ Appeal Brief. We concur with the
conclusions reached by the Examiner.
Regarding claim 1, as stated by the Examiner (Ans. 32-33), Sellars
discloses generating and distributing encrypted license 52 to service
providers and consumers such that the requested content is distributed only
if the encrypted license is valid. In particular, Sellars discloses that the
content provider encrypts content with a set of keys maintained by the
provider or the authenticator 28 which also provides a number of mutating
IDs as the content provider 22 needs (¶ [0055]) and tracks which service
provider 24 the content came from and notifies the content provider 22 (¶¶
[0056], [0060]). As shown in Figure 5, Sellars describes the process of
obtaining the encrypted license 52 by the customer’s hardware, sending the
doubly encrypted license to the authenticator 28, which checks the license
for validity and informs the service provider to send the content to the
customer (see ¶¶ [0065] – [0066]).
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We disagree with Appellants (Reply Br. 4-5) that sending the
encrypted license 52 in Sellars is different from assigning the encryption key
to the display unit and the content server. In fact, the authenticator 28 of
Sellars keeps track of the mutating IDs and distributing them to the content
providers and service providers (¶ [0060]). Therefore, sending by the
service provider 24 the encrypted license associated with the content, which
was received from the content provider 22, to the customer implies that the
license was assigned to the customer display unit and the content provider
for the requested content before the license was sent. In other words, even if
the encryption keys or the mutating IDs are sent to the content provider and
then to the service provider, which sends the license to the customer, Sellars’
disclosure meets the claimed “authentication server that assigns an
encryption key to the video display unit and to the content server” because
direct assignment of the encryption key is not required by the claim.
We also agree with the Examiner’s proposed rationale for combining
the references based on the improvements one of ordinary skill in the art
would have obtained from the known encryption techniques of Sellars (see
Ans. 33-34). It appears to us that Appellants take the Examiner’s proposed
combination as using the encryption process of Sellars in the system
described by the combination of Lipsanen, Weinberger, Peace and Parrott,
while the functionality of Lipsanen and Weinberger with respect to content
delivery is followed (see App. Br. 17). We specifically note that Appellants’
challenge to the references individually is not convincing of error in the
Examiner’s position because all of the features of the secondary reference
need not be bodily incorporated into the primary reference, but consideration
should be given to what the combined teachings, knowledge of one of
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ordinary skill in the art, and the nature of the problem to be solved as a
whole would have suggested to those of ordinary skill in the art (see In re
Keller, 642 F.2d 413, 425 (CCPA 1981)). Furthermore, the artisan is not
compelled to blindly follow the teaching of one prior art reference over the
other without the exercise of independent judgment (see Lear Siegler, Inc. v.
Aeroquip Corp., 733 F.2d 881, 889 (Fed. Cir. 1984)). The Examiner
explains (Ans. 34-35) that the two-way communication of Lipsanen and
Weinberger is modified to include the encryption scheme of Sellars, where
additional security is provided for content delivery. We agree with the
Examiner’s analysis.
We further note that Peace is relied on by the Examiner to show
distributing the claimed “selected content” as bulk data which is sent as
TCP/IP protocol using a streaming network protocol or a guaranteed
delivery protocol (see Ans. 35). Additionally, the Examiner finds that one of
message, video data, or audio data as the time critical data is distributed
using a streaming delivery protocol such as UDP and/or RTP without error
correction (id.). Therefore, Peace teaches different data distribution types
recited in claim 1.

CONCLUSIONS
1. The Examiner did not err in rejecting claim 1 under 35 U.S.C.
§ 103(a) as being obvious over the combination of Lipsanen, Weinberger,
Sellars, Parrott, and Peace.
2. Claims 1-3, 5-10, 12-15, and 17-23 are not patentable.

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DECISION
The Examiner’s decision rejecting claims 1-3, 5-10, 12-15, and 17-23
is affirmed.
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).

AFFIRMED

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