Obviousness

Under 35 U.S.C. § 103, a patent claim is considered obvious if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA) before the effective filing date of the claimed invention. The earliest priority date for US patent 9667751 is October 3, 2000, derived from U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 60/237,571.

The "Prior Art" for this analysis will be drawn from the documents explicitly referenced and incorporated by reference within the US9667751 patent text that predate this priority date. These references provide a basis for determining what was known or obvious to a PHOSITA at the time of the invention.

Identified Prior Art References:

From the "CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS" and "DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF PREFERRED EMBODIMENTS" sections of US9667751, the following commonly owned patents and patent applications are incorporated by reference and have filing dates prior to October 3, 2000:

1. US Pat. No. 6,195,024 ("Content Independent Data Compression Method and System") - Filed March 11, 1999 (from its Google Patents page). This corresponds to U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/266,394, also filed March 11, 1999.
2. US Pat. No. 6,309,424 ("System and method for accelerating the transfer and storage of data") - Filed January 11, 2000 (from its Google Patents page). This corresponds to U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/481,243, also filed January 11, 2000.

These two patents (US6195024 and US6309424), along with their underlying application disclosures, form the primary basis for the obviousness analysis, as they are explicitly described in US9667751 as disclosing fundamental aspects of the current invention, such as compression methods and storage acceleration techniques.

The Invention of US9667751 (in brief):
US9667751 discloses systems and methods for "data feed acceleration," particularly for broadcast data like financial data and news feeds. The core concept involves using real-time data compression and decompression over a communication channel to increase effective bandwidth and reduce latency. A key aspect is that the total time for compression, transmission, and decompression is less than the time for transmitting uncompressed data (Equation). The patent describes both content-dependent statistical compression (e.g., Huffman or Arithmetic encoding with state machines) and content-independent compression, and the ability to combine or switch between them. It also covers security features (like virtual encryption or encrypted tables), field-specific compression, and robust handling of packetized data streams.

Obviousness Combination: US6309424 + US6195024

A person having ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA) in data communication, compression, and financial data systems would find the claimed invention of US9667751 obvious by combining the teachings of US6309424 and US6195024.

1. Teachings of US6309424:
US6309424 describes a "system and method for accelerating the transfer and storage of data" by rapidly compressing and decompressing data in real-time or faster. This acceleration is explicitly achieved when the total time for compression, transfer/storage, and decompression is less than the uncompressed transfer/storage time. The patent notes its suitability for "financial data over networks or to storage devices" and that the compression algorithm utilizes a "state machine model for character encoding and a plurality of state tables." This reference directly teaches the core concept of "data acceleration" as defined in US9667751 (Equation), its application to financial data over networks, and the use of state-machine based compression.

2. Teachings of US6195024:
US6195024 discloses a "content independent data compression method and system" that achieves an optimal compression ratio regardless of the input data content. It operates by compressing an input data stream with multiple different encoders and then generating an encoded data stream by selectively combining compressed data blocks from these encoders based on their achieved compression ratios. US9667751 itself describes this method in detail and states that it "may be used in addition to, or in lieu of, the statistical based compression schemes".

3. Motivation to Combine:
A PHOSITA would have been motivated to combine the teachings of US6309424 and US6195024 to enhance the acceleration of data feeds, particularly for financial information.

• Addressing Data Variability: The background of US9667751 explicitly acknowledges a "fundamental problem within the current art is the high latency and poor compression due to the use of generic data compression algorithms on financial data and news feeds," further noting that "data types and content format is constantly changed within the financial industry". While US6309424 provides a general acceleration framework for financial data using state machines (a form of content-dependent compression), a PHOSITA seeking to improve robustness and maintain optimal compression across variable or rapidly changing financial data formats (like the "abrupt changes, such as the recent switch to decimalization" mentioned in US9667751's background) would naturally look for a solution like the content-independent compression of US6195024.
• Optimizing Performance: US6195024's ability to achieve "optimal compression ratio for an encoded stream regardless of the data content" would be a desirable feature to integrate into US6309424's data acceleration system. This combination would directly address the problem of poor compression efficiency in existing systems, ensuring that high compression ratios and thus greater effective bandwidth and reduced latency are consistently achieved, even with diverse data types.
• Explicit Disclosure in US9667751: US9667751 itself provides the motivation, stating that a compression system "may employ both a content-dependent scheme and a content-independent scheme". It also describes an adaptive mechanism to switch to a content-independent scheme or modify tables "when the efficiency of a content-dependent scheme falls below a predetermined threshold based on, e.g., a change in the data structure of the data stream". This internal disclosure effectively outlines the motivation for a PHOSITA to combine these two known techniques for improved data acceleration.

Obviousness of Other Features:

• Security (Virtual Encryption / Encrypted Tables): Given that US6309424 already pertains to financial data over networks, a PHOSITA would recognize the inherent need for data security. The idea of using the complexity of efficient compression as a form of "virtual encryption" or encrypting critical components like client-side decompression tables would be a straightforward engineering decision for a skilled artisan concerned with protecting sensitive financial information in transit.
• Field-Specific Compression: US6309424 teaches state-machine based compression. For structured data like financial feeds, a PHOSITA would readily appreciate that optimizing compression for specific, known fields (e.g., stock symbols, prices, timestamps, message sequence numbers) would yield better compression ratios. Concepts like encoding differences for sequential values (time, sequence numbers) or using variable-length codes for common values, as detailed in US9667751, are common compression optimizations when the data structure is known. The provision of a "data field specific compiler" in US9667751 would be an obvious way to automate the creation of such optimized compression algorithms for different data feeds.
• Packet-to-Packet Independence: US9667751 states that its system has "no packet-to-packet data dependency" to handle UDP/Multicast operations where packet delivery order or guarantee is absent. The state machine approach, as disclosed in US6309424 and elaborated in US9667751 (where encoding is based on a-priori knowledge and context within a block/packet), inherently supports this if each compressible unit is self-contained. Designing such a system to be robust against network conditions for real-time applications would be an expected design choice for a PHOSITA.

Therefore, the combination of US6309424 and US6195024, along with the common general knowledge in the art regarding data security and compression optimization for structured data, would render the claims of US9667751 obvious to a PHOSITA.