While this post is about another recent Section 101 PTAB decision, the case was specifically selected In the spirit of the holidays. Whether you are having a quiet holiday, taking a vacation, or traveling to see friends and family, hopefully you will be able to take a break from social media. But, don’t worry, social media giants have a solution to make sure they don’t lose any advertising opportunities.
Facebook filed a patent application (13/829,410) for a new idea to tell “stories” to you about your friends’ amazing lives and holiday vacations, using a batch process so that, presumably, the story has enough juicy details to catch your attention once you see it. Of course a side benefit to this is that they can then serve up some ads to take advantage of your interest in said stories. What better approach to make sure that you are sucked back into your social media feed as soon as you return from vacation.
The case wound through prosecution and eventually made it to the PTAB (Appeal 2019-000828). Claim 1 on appeal is listed below:
1. A computer-implemented method comprising:
maintaining profiles for a plurality of users of a social networking system, each user’s profile comprising connections to other users of the social networking system;
receiving information from a third-party system about actions performed by the users of the social networking system in the third-party system;
logging the information about the actions performed in the third party system; and for a viewing user of the social networking system:
identifying, from the maintained profiles, by one or more processors of the social networking system, a plurality of related users having implied connections to the viewing user,
identifying, from the logged information, a set of relevant actions performed in the third party system by the identified plurality of related users;
identifying a set of content objects having targeting criteria, each content object in the set of content objects being associated with a type of action;
selecting, by the social networking system, a plurality of actions from the identified set of relevant actions, each action in the plurality of actions corresponding to a content object in the set of content objects and being selected based on the action matching the type of action for the content object and on the viewing user satisfying the targeting criteria for the content object;
generating a plurality of informational messages for the viewing user in a batch process, an informational message for the viewing user comprising information about one of the selected actions and one of the identified related users who performed the one of the selected actions,
storing the plurality of informational messages in local storage, periodically, after a passage of a predetermined interval of time, generating an updated plurality of informational messages for the viewing user in a batch process and updating the stored plurality of informational messages in the local storage with the updated plurality of informational messages; and
responsive to the request for the feed, providing the feed for display from the social networking system to the viewing user, the feed comprising one or more of the plurality of informational messages retrieved from the local storage.
The PTAB’s decision follows its typical analysis. As to whether the claims included abstract ideas, the PTAB confirmed that claim 1 involves mental processes and certain methods of organizing human activity, namely commercial interactions including advertising or marketing activities, and/or managing personal behavior or relationships or interactions between people (including social activities). It was only downhill for Facebook after that.
The PTAB cited the most recent guidelines, from Oct. 2019, to confirm that communicating messages about actions performed by a person in a social group of people involves a mental process by a human to announce the results of certain observations of those people to one of the people, and involves organizing human activity via messages that may include marketing or advertisements, and involves managing personal behavior or relationships or interactions between people (including social activities), by communicating the information to a selected person of the social group.
Next was the issue of whether the claims integrated the abstract idea into a practical application. This often is an area where patent applicants can be successful, particularly if the specification describes a technical problem solved by particular claim elements. Unfortunately for Facebook, their specification was devoid of any such disclosure. Facebook tried to argue that the claimed invention provides an unconventional application of generating informational messages for a viewing user, and that the unconventional application of this concept yields different and improved content items selected for users of the social networking system compared to prior selection approaches. However, without a technical problem or technical advantage, the PTAB simply found that these types of communication, namely telling stories about group members depending upon certain relationships, forms part of the abstract idea itself..
Facebook tried several ways to bring in their “unconventional” advertising approach but met a roadblock each time. Again, this is a difficult argument for an applicant to win when the specification has little to no discussion of technical solutions to technical problems. As explained by the PTAB:
But, even if this alleged “unconventional method” involves “additional elements” outside the abstract idea, Appellant does not explain how viewing and reporting about such user’s actions requires anything beyond implementing well-understood, routine, conventional data collection and analysis involving conventional websites and conventional social networks. The Specification and Appellant’s arguments show that social networking systems or websites conventionally tracked user’s locations and interests, so they conventionally would have been able to track other information about a user.
Facebook’s argument about improving efficiency also fell flat. The PTAB found that argument merely reduces to the fundamental idea that doing something less often (i.e., sending information in a “batch process”) reduces the amount of effort involved. Notebly, what Facebook did not do was show that the inventors conceived of, or claim 1 requires, an unconventional batch process, beyond merely saving letters or collections of local stories for a neighbor on vacation, and then delivering it all in batch form when the neighbor returns.
In the end, the PTAB’s decision ensures that every social media platform will be able to use this story-based advertising approach to make sure and suck us back in as soon as we return from the holiday. Enjoy the break!