User:Hattring/info237

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 9th, 1998. The patents involved methods for network intrusion detection.

The '203' patent was approved on November 19th, 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.
 * 1) Patent Nos. 6,484,203 (the '203' patent)

The '615' patent was approved on March 23rd, 2004. Similar to the '203' patent, it also outlined a computer-automated method for network monitoring and analysis.
 * 1) Patent Nos. 6,711,615 (the '615' 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.
 * 1) Patent Nos. 6,321,338 (the '338' patent)

The '212' patent was approved on March 16th, 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.
 * 1) Patent Nos. 6,708,212 (the '212' patent)

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 9th, 1998, the determination of prior art required the papers become publicly accessible after November 9th, 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" or circulation case.

Papers
Disputes over patent validity were focused on the existence of two papers on SRI's website.

EMERALD 1997
The EMERALD paper was present 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.

Live Traffic Paper
The Live Traffic paper was presented at the Internet Society's Networks and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium as "Live Traffic Analysis of TCP/IP Gateways". The paper described statistical and signature-based techniques to monitor network traffic. Methods for the '212', '615', '338', and '203' patents were all described in this paper. The paper was published on SRI's website on November 10th, 1997. Prior to this publication, the paper had been available on SRI's ftp server starting on August 1st, 1997.

District Court Analysis
The case was heard by District Judge Sue Lewis Robinson on October 17th, 2006. She held that the EMERALD paper enabled the '212' patent and that the Live Traffic paper qualified as prior art before November 9, 1997.

The validity of the ‘212’ patent hinged on the description given in the EMERALD paper. SRI argued the EMERALD paper was a “statement of intent” and could not be accomplished by a person with ordinary skill. SSI and Symantec contended that the details for implementing these methods were within the knowledge of a person of ordinary skill. Robinson concluded that the ‘212’ patent was anticipated by the EMERALD paper over a year in advance of the patent application and was therefore invalid.

The prior art qualification for the Live Traffic paper centered on the public accessibility of a document available on a ftp server. SRI argued that the ftp site was not publicly accessible because one would need the complete ftp address to view the paper. Additionally, the posting was not indexed and could only be found by an ordinary skilled user through “dumb luck”. Symantec and SSI countered that on multiple occasions SRI had provided links to the ftp site to multiple members of the intrusion detection community. Furthermore, SRI’s ftp site had been referenced by Google Groups and was widely regarded as a repository of information for computer security. Robinson’s examination of the case evidence noted that no attempts were made to limit access via password security. Robinson deemed the Live Traffic paper publicly accessible as established by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in the precedent cases In re Bayer, In re Hall , In re Cronyn , and In re Klopfenstein. As such, Robinson ruled that the Live Traffic paper constituted as prior art and that the patents described in the publication were invalid.

SRI subsequently appealed the decision to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.