Show me new prior art! Case study on Cuozzo speedometer patent currently in front of US Supreme Court
US6778074 was filed by Cuozzo Speed Technologies back in 2002, and claims a car speedometer which can change colour of its markings depending on the local speed limit, as determined by GPS.
This humble little patent has made its way to the US Supreme court, which is currently hearing arguments in relation to :
- Whether the court of appeals erred in holding that, in IPR proceedings, the Board may construe claims in an issued patent according to their broadest reasonable interpretation rather than their plain and ordinary meaning.
- Whether the court of appeals erred in holding that, even if the Board exceeds its statutory authority in instituting an IPR proceeding, the Board’s decision whether to institute an IPR proceeding is judicially unreviewable
Here at Ambercite we will leave the resolution of these arguments to the esteemed justices, although Chief Justice has already started expressing his opinon: “A bizarre way to … decide a legal question” and a “very extraordinary animal in legal culture to have two different proceedings addressing the same question“.
As is often the case when considering a patent, we are curious to know whether it is truly novel or not. And this is an ideal opportunity to test our just improved interface in Cluster Searching, which makes it even easier to to focus the results on ‘unknown’ prior art(not listed as a patent citation), say compared to ‘known’ citations (previously listed as a patent ciation)
As always, the search process can be very fast – we simply enter the patent number and a date filter cutt-off, in this caes the filing date of the Cuozzo patent:
The first few results look like this, ranked in order of predicted similarity.
Note the last column, which shows the usual combination of ‘known’ and ‘unknown’ citations. There is a litte antenna like symbol on top of this column, which opens up a filter for this column.
If we select this button, we can perhaps the select the “unknown citations” . These prior art documents have have not been nominated as patent citations previously – and so perhaps be used as the basis for both a USPTO or US Supreme Court review.
This will produce the following set of results:
Third on this list is US6633811, filed by Bosch in the year 2000 for a Method of automatically adjusting a vehicle speed display according to vehicle location, and disclosing:
…speed limits at the current location may be displayed on the speed scale itself by highlighting an appropriate scale mark or producing a scale mark of a different length or color. The current location may be obtained from an on-board GPS
How easy was that?
(Note – If I was acting for the opponents for Cuozzo, I would now run a second an Cluster Search based on both US6778074 and US6633811).
Want to try this for yourself at home or work?
Please contact us for a free trial, or even a free patent search for patent litigators – you may be very surprised to see what we can do for you, and how easy it all is.
