Obviousness

Obviousness Analysis of US7383209 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

This analysis evaluates whether the invention claimed in U.S. Patent No. US7383209 would have been obvious to a Person Having Ordinary Skill in the Art (PHOSITA) at the time of the invention, based on the prior art references identified previously. The legal standard for obviousness under 35 U.S.C. § 103 prevents the patenting of an invention if the differences between the 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 PHOSITA.

A PHOSITA in June 1995 would likely have been a computer scientist or engineer with knowledge of computer networking (including the rapidly growing Internet and World Wide Web), database systems, and common input technologies such as barcode scanning.

The core inventive concept of US7383209 is the use of a standard product identifier (like a UPC) as an index to look up a network address (a URL) in a remote database, which then allows a user's computer to connect to a separate information computer over a wide area network like the Internet.

The independent claims (1 and 23) of US7383209 would have been obvious to a PHOSITA by combining the teachings of existing prior art, particularly the system described in U.S. Patent No. 5,128,525 ('525 patent) with the well-established and rapidly expanding infrastructure of the World Wide Web as it existed in 1995.

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Primary Combination: U.S. Patent No. 5,128,525 in view of the World Wide Web

1. What the '525 Patent Teaches: The '525 patent explicitly discloses the foundational elements of the claimed invention. It teaches a system where a user can scan a standard UPC barcode on a product (Claim 1a: "machine-read a data carrier modulated with an index"). The scanning terminal then communicates with a remote computer that contains a database, which associates the UPC index with detailed product information (Claim 1b: "communicating with... computers... having a table... associating an index to... information"). The remote computer then transmits this information back to the user's terminal for display (Claim 1c & 1d). The system described in the '525 patent therefore teaches the entire process flow of scanning a product code to retrieve remote information from a database lookup.

2. The Missing Element: The primary difference between the system in the '525 patent and the claims of US7383209 is the nature of the network and the retrieved data. The '525 patent envisions its system on a local or proprietary network (like within a single retail chain) and describes the database as containing the product information itself. US7383209 claims a system on a broad "computer network" (like the Internet) where the database lookup returns a "pointer" (like a URL) to a different information computer.

3. Motivation to Combine/Modify: By the priority date of June 1995, the World Wide Web was a transformative and widely publicized technology. Businesses were rushing to create websites to provide marketing materials, product specifications, and customer support. The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) was the standard method for addressing and accessing these resources.

   A PHOSITA, familiar with both the UPC lookup system of the '525 patent and the architecture of the Web, would have been motivated to combine these concepts for clear commercial reasons:

   • Scalability and Centralization: It would have been obvious that storing comprehensive, up-to-date information for every product on thousands of disparate, store-level servers (as suggested in '525) was inefficient. The Web provided a perfect model for solving this: allow each manufacturer to host its own information on its own web server ("information computer") and have a central directory service ('routing computer") that simply points to the correct location.
   • Richness of Content: A simple text-based database on a store server, as in '525, is limited. The Web, with its Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), allowed for rich, multimedia content. A PHOSITA would be motivated to modify the '525 system to access this superior content, enhancing the user experience.
   • Ease of Implementation: Modifying the '525 system would be a straightforward engineering task. Instead of storing product data in the database record associated with the UPC, one would simply store the URL for that product. The user terminal, instead of being a simple display, would be a "requesting computer" running a web browser. This modification leverages existing, standard technology (browsers, URLs, HTTP) to improve the prior art system.

Therefore, a PHOSITA would have found it obvious to adapt the UPC-lookup system of the '525 patent for use with the Internet. This adaptation would involve changing the database content from product data to URLs (pointers) and using a web browser to access those URLs, thus arriving at the invention claimed in US7383209.

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Secondary Rationale: Obviousness of a Distributed System

Claim 1 calls for "routing computers" (plural), and dependent claims describe a multi-step lookup process. A PHOSITA in 1995 tasked with building a global-scale system for resolving millions of UPCs to URLs would have immediately recognized the need for a distributed, hierarchical database. The clear and ubiquitous model for this at the time was the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS). DNS was, and is, a massive distributed database that resolves human-readable names into network IP addresses. It would have been an obvious design choice to model a UPC-to-URL resolution service on the proven architecture of DNS, using multiple servers ("routing computers") to handle requests and maintain the association tables. This approach is a standard and obvious solution to the problem of creating a large, scalable lookup service.

Conclusion

The independent claims of US7383209 are rendered obvious by U.S. Patent No. 5,128,525 in view of the known architecture and capabilities of the World Wide Web and its associated technologies (URLs, HTTP, browsers) as they existed in 1995. The '525 patent teaches the core method of scanning a UPC to look up associated information in a remote database. A person of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated by clear commercial and technical benefits to adapt this system to the Internet by replacing the stored data with URLs, thereby creating the claimed invention without the need for an inventive step. The implementation of such a system using multiple, distributed "routing computers" would have been a further obvious design choice based on well-known systems like DNS.