SRI International, Inc. v. Internet Security Systems, Inc., 511 F.3d 1186 (Fed. Cir. 2008), was a patent infringement case which determined whether technical documents placed on a company's FTP server could be considered prior art as defined by 35 U.S.C. § 102(b). The United States District Court for the District of Delaware had held four of SRI International's patents invalid due to prior art considerations.
A three-member panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed and remanded the District Court decision. The decision is particularly relevant to patent law because it set the precedent for treatment of electronic information under the Federal Circuit's public accessibility precedents for prior art. The decision is also notable for an impassioned dissent-in-part filed by Judge Kimberly A. Moore.
Background
The case involved four United States patents filed by SRI International, Inc. (SRI). SRI attempted to license these patents to Symantec and Internet Security Systems (ISS). When these negotiations broke down SRI filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court of the District of Delaware, alleging that the patents were infringed by Symantec's ManHunt product and by ISS's Site Protector and Proventia products. Symantec and ISS moved for summary judgement that their products were non-infringing; the motion was denied. ISS and Symantec then moved for summary judgement that the patents were invalid due to prior art considerations.
Patents
All of the patents stem form a patent application filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office by SRI on November 9, 1998. The patents involved methods for network intrusion detection.
Patent Nos. 6,484,203 (the '203' patent) The '203' patent was approved on November 19, 2002. It outlined a computer-automated method for network monitoring and analysis where network monitors are deployed at gateways, routers or proxy servers. The network monitors detect suspicious network activities based on analysis of network traffic data from information included in the network packet. The suspicious activity is reported to other networks allowing appropriate counter-measures to be applied.
Patent Nos. 6,711,615 (the '615' patent) The '615' patent was approved on March 23, 2004. Similar to the '203' patent, it also outlined a computer-automated method for network monitoring and analysis.
Patent Nos. 6,321,338 (the '338' patent) The '338' patent was approved on November 20, 2001. It described a particular statistical algorithm for detecting suspicious network activity. In this method a long-term and short-term statistical profile was created from information in the network packets. The short-term profile could then be compared to the long-term profile pointing out changes in network activity, an indication of suspicious network activity.
Patent Nos. 6,708,212 (the '212' patent) The '212' patent was approved on March 16, 2004. It described the combination of the statistical algorithm described in the '338' patent with the network monitoring methods described in the '203' and '615' patents.
Prior art
According to , a patent is invalid if "the invention was patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country or in public use or on sale in this country, more than one year prior to the date of the application for patent in the United States". Since the patent application was filed on November 9, 1998, prior art determination focused on the date of November 9, 1997.
The opinions of this case concentrated on four prominent cases in the determination of a document as a "printed publication". In re Bayer, In re Hall, and In re Cronyn were known as "thesis/library" cases and were used to define the boundaries of public accessibility of a printed document. The boundaries of public accessibility for a presentation were described in In re Klopfenstein, which is referred to as a dissemination case.
Papers
Disputes over patent validity were focused on the existence of two papers on SRI's website.
EMERALD 1997
The EMERALD paper was presented to the National Information Systems Security Conference (NISSC) as "Event Monitoring Enabling Responses to Anomalous Live Disturbances". EMERALD was described as a new approach to network surveillance with a streamlined event-analysis system combining signature analysis with statistical profiling. This paper provided part of the description for the '212' patent. This paper was published in October 1997.