Obviousness — US Patent 10984445

Based on the provided prior art analysis, here is an assessment of the obviousness of US patent 10,984,445 under 35 U.S.C. § 103.

Obviousness Analysis under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Under 35 U.S.C. § 103, a patent claim is invalid if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA). The relevant date for this analysis is the patent's earliest priority date, June 19, 2006.

The core of independent claim 1 of the '445 patent is a three-party system: a "profile supplier" (where user activity is observed), a central "profile owner computer" (which collects profiles and matches them to requests), and a "media property entity" (which requests profiles and receives them to serve targeted ads). The key inventive concept, as distinguished from prior art like Chitkara and Sloan in the preceding analysis, appears to be that the profile owner provides the collected profile to the media property for its own use, rather than simply using the profile to serve an ad on the media property's site on behalf of an advertiser.

The following combinations of prior art would likely have rendered the claims of US 10,984,445 obvious to a PHOSITA in 2006.

1. Combination of Chitkara (US 2002/0087595 A1) and Scriffignano (US 2005/0216353 A1)

This combination presents a strong case for obviousness.

What Chitkara Discloses: Chitkara teaches a sophisticated, centralized "targeting service provider" that performs most of the steps claimed in '445. It collects behavioral data from a network of publisher websites ("profile suppliers"), creates user profiles linked to cookies ("tags"), stores advertisers' targeting criteria ("stored requests"), and uses the profiles to deliver targeted ads to users.
What is Arguably Missing in Chitkara: As noted in the prior art analysis, Chitkara's system retains control of the profiles. It acts as a closed ad network, serving ads into a media property's ad space. It does not explicitly teach the step of selecting a media property and providing the profile information to that property for its own independent use.
What Scriffignano Teaches: Scriffignano explicitly remedies this deficiency. It discloses a system that creates a "consumer interest profile" and then "is provided to online advertisers or merchants" so that they can present targeted advertisements. Scriffignano teaches the exact business model and data flow that is allegedly the novel step in the '445 patent: the transfer of profile intelligence to the media property itself.
Motivation to Combine: A person of ordinary skill in the art of online advertising in 2006 would have been clearly motivated to combine the technical system of Chitkara with the business model of Scriffignano. The motivation is primarily commercial. A company operating a system like Chitkara's would seek to expand its market. While some advertisers are content to have a network serve ads for them, other large media properties (e.g., major portals or news sites) have their own ad servers, sales forces, and optimization technology. These entities would prefer to receive raw targeting data to integrate into their own systems, giving them more control and allowing them to sell their ad inventory directly. Offering the profile data as a licensable product, as taught by Scriffignano, would be an obvious way for the operator of Chitkara's system to attract these larger, more sophisticated customers. Therefore, a PHOSITA would have been motivated to modify Chitkara's technical platform to enable the data-provision model disclosed by Scriffignano, leading directly to the invention claimed in '445 with a reasonable expectation of success.

2. Combination of Sloan (US 2002/0128911 A1) and General Industry Knowledge of "Cookie Matching"

This alternative combination also supports a finding of obviousness.

What Sloan Discloses: Similar to Chitkara, Sloan describes a central "profiling system" that aggregates consumer data, links it to a tag, and allows marketers to define a target audience based on profile attributes. The system then delivers targeted content to matching consumers. Like Chitkara, Sloan's system retains the profile data centrally.
Motivation to Modify Sloan's System: A PHOSITA would have understood that the primary asset in Sloan's system is the valuable database of aggregated user profiles. In 2006, a primary goal of any such data-centric business was to maximize monetization. Beyond acting as a service that delivers ads (as Sloan describes), an obvious alternative or additional business model would be to license or sell access to the profile data itself. This would allow third parties, such as large media properties, to enhance their own targeting capabilities. This motivation does not require a specific prior art reference, as data brokerage and licensing were well-understood business concepts.
How a PHOSITA Would Implement the Modification: To implement this business model, the PHOSITA would need a technical mechanism to allow a media property to recognize a user for whom the central system holds a profile. The '445 patent's own background description acknowledges that the process of "cookie matching" was a known solution for this exact problem, referencing DoubleClick's "Boomerang" service (Column 9, lines 5-13). This process allows two different domains (e.g., the profile owner and the media property) to synchronize their cookies for a given user, enabling the media property to "tag" the user and later recognize them. A PHOSITA, tasked with modifying Sloan's system to provide profiles to media properties, would have naturally and obviously turned to the well-known technique of cookie matching to implement the required data link.
Conclusion: Combining Sloan's centralized profiling system with the known, standard industry technique of cookie matching to enable the transfer of profile information would result in the system claimed in claim 1 of the '445 patent. The motivation would be to pursue an obvious, alternative monetization strategy for the collected data, and the implementation would rely on readily available, known technical solutions.