`
`IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF FEDERAL CLAIMS
`
`
`E-NUMERATE SOLUTIONS, INC., and
`E-NUMERATE, LLC
`
`Plaintiff,
`
`v.
`
`THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
`
`
`
`
`
`
`
`No. 19-859 C
`
`Judge Lydia Kay Griggsby
`
`
`
`
`
`
`
`
`
`Defendant.
`
`
`
`DEFENDANT UNITED STATES OF AMERICA’S
`MOTION TO DISMISS UNDER RULE 12(b)(6)
`
`APPENDIX
`
`
`E-Numerate Solutions, Inc. et al v. Mattress Firm Holding Corp., et al.,
` 1:17-cv-00933-RGA (D. Del) (“Delaware Case”), ECF 31 (without attachments) ................ A1
`
`Delaware Case, Nov. 9, 2017 Hearing Transcript ...................................................................... A31
`
`Delaware Case, ECF 28-1 ........................................................................................................... A71
`
`Delaware Case, ECF 30 .............................................................................................................. A99
`
`Appl. No. 10/052,250 Terminal Disclaimer (Oct. 12, 2016) .................................................... A100
`
`Appl. No. 09/573,780 Office Action (Dec. 28, 2005) .............................................................. A102
`
`Appl. No. 09/573,780 Reply to Office Action (Mar. 28, 2006) ............................................... A110
`
`Appl. No. 09/573,780 Reply to Office Action (Aug. 30, 2006) ............................................... A132
`
`Appl. No. 12/222,752 Reply to Office Action (Nov. 7, 2011) ................................................. A153
`
`Appl. No. 12/222,751 Reply to Office Action (Nov. 14, 2011) ............................................... A172
`
`Appl. No. 11/819,125 Reply to Office Action (Oct. 14, 2010) ................................................ A192
`
`Appl. No. 09/573,780 Office Action (Sep. 21, 2006) ............................................................... A199
`
`
`
`
`
`
`
`Case 1:19-cv-00859-RTH Document 8-1 Filed 10/11/19 Page 2 of 239
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`Case 1:17-cv-00933-RGA Document 31 Filed 07/20/18 Page 1 of 30 PageID #: 1872
`
`IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
`FOR THE DISTRICT OF DELAWARE
`
`E-NUMERATE SOLUTIONS, INC. and
`E-NUMERATE, LLC,
`
`Plaintiffs,
`
`v.
`
`Civil Action No.: 17-933-RGA
`
`MATTRESS FIRM HOLDING CORP.,
`MERRILL COMMUNICATIONS LLC, AND
`MERRILL CORPORATION,
`
`JURY TRIAL DEMANDED
`
`Defendants.
`
`SECOND AMENDED COMPLAINT
`
`Plaintiffs, e-Numerate Solutions, Inc. (“ESI”) and e-Numerate, LLC, bring this action
`
`against Defendants Mattress Firm Holding Corp. (“Mattress Firm”), Merrill Communications
`
`LLC, (“Merrill Communications”) and Merrill Corporation and allege the following:
`
`THE PARTIES
`
`1.
`
`Plaintiff ESI is a corporation organized and existing under the laws of the State of
`
`Delaware with its principal place of business located in Great Falls, VA.
`
`2.
`
`Plaintiff e-Numerate, LLC is a limited liability corporation organized and existing
`
`under the laws of Delaware with its principal place of business located in Reston, VA.
`
`3.
`
`ESI is the owner of record and assignee of United States Patents 7,650,355 (“the
`
`‘355 patent”); 8,185,816 (“the ‘816 patent”); 9,262,383 (“the ‘383 patent”); and 9,268,748 (“the
`
`‘748 patent”) (collectively, “the Asserted Patents”).
`
`4.
`
`Plaintiff e-Numerate, LLC is the exclusive licensee of the Asserted Patents and
`
`has the exclusive right to pursue this lawsuit based on infringement of the Asserted Patents.
`
`
`
`Case 1:19-cv-00859-RTH Document 8-1 Filed 10/11/19 Page 3 of 239
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`Case 1:17-cv-00933-RGA Document 31 Filed 07/20/18 Page 2 of 30 PageID #: 1873
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`5.
`
`Defendant Mattress Firm is a corporation organized and existing under the laws of
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`the State of Delaware with its principal place of business at 5815 Gulf Freeway, Houston, TX
`
`77023. Mattress Firm’s agent for service of process is The Corporation Trust Company,
`
`Corporation Trust Center, 1209 Orange Street, Wilmington, DE 19801.
`
`6.
`
`Defendant Merrill Communications is a Delaware limited liability company with
`
`its principal place of business at One Merrill Circle, St. Paul, MN 55108. Merrill
`
`Communications’ agent for service of process is Corporation Service Company, 251 Little Falls
`
`Dr., Wilmington, DE 19808
`
`7.
`
`Defendant Merrill Corporation is a corporation organized and existing under the
`
`laws of Minnesota with its principal place of business at 1 Merrill Circle, St Paul, MN 55108.
`
`JURISDICTION AND VENUE
`
`8.
`
`This is an action for patent infringement arising under the patent laws of the
`
`United States, 35 U.S.C. § 271, et seq.
`
`9.
`
`This Court has subject matter jurisdiction pursuant to 28 U.S.C. §§ 1331 and
`
`1338(a).
`
`10.
`
`This Court has personal jurisdiction over Defendant Mattress Firm since
`
`Defendant Mattress Firm is a Delaware corporation and Defendant Mattress Firm has regularly
`
`transacted business in this judicial district, directly or through intermediaries including various
`
`Mattress Firm subsidiaries. On information and belief, Defendant Mattress Firm or its
`
`subsidiaries operate multiple retail outlets within Delaware.
`
`11.
`
`This Court has personal jurisdiction over Defendant Merrill Communications
`
`since Defendant Merrill Communications is a Delaware Limited Liability Company and, upon
`
`information and belief, has regularly transacted business in this district.
`
`2
`
`
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`Case 1:19-cv-00859-RTH Document 8-1 Filed 10/11/19 Page 4 of 239
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`Case 1:17-cv-00933-RGA Document 31 Filed 07/20/18 Page 3 of 30 PageID #: 1874
`
`12.
`
`Upon information and belief, this Court has personal jurisdiction over Defendant
`
`Merrill Corporation since Merrill Corporation has regularly transacted business in this judicial
`
`district directly or through intermediaries including Merrill Communications. Upon information
`
`and belief, Merrill Corporation maintains a work-from-home program that includes employees
`
`located in this jurisdiction. A listing of the various work from home locations for Merrill
`
`Corporation is shown in Exhibit A which can be found on the world wide web at:
`
`https://hrx.talx.com/Files/Division143/Merrill%20Corporation%20List%20of%20Locations.pdf
`
`13.
`
`Venue in this district is proper pursuant to 28 U.S.C. §§ 1391(c) and (d), and
`
`1400(b). Defendant Mattress Firm resides in Delaware since it is a Delaware Corporation.
`
`Defendant Merrill Communications resides in Delaware since it is a Delaware LLC. Upon
`
`information and belief, venue is appropriate as to Defendant Merrill Corporation because it has
`
`committed acts of infringement in this district either directly or through its subsidiaries including
`
`Defendant Merrill Communications. Upon further information and belief, Defendant Merrill
`
`Corporation has a regular and established place of business in this district including via its work-
`
`from-home locations in Delaware.
`
`14.
`
`Joinder of Mattress Firm, Merrill Communications and Merrill Corporation is
`
`appropriate under 35 U.S.C. § 299 because the claims herein relate to same transaction,
`
`occurrence, or series of transactions or occurrences relating to the making, using, importing into
`
`the United States, offering for sale, or selling of the same accused product or process; and
`
`questions of fact common to all defendants or counterclaim defendants will arise in the action.
`
`The Defendants in this action are in a supplier-customer relationship.
`
`BACKGROUND OF THE TECHNOLOGY
`
`15.
`
`Inventor Russell T. Davis pioneered several inventions related to Reusable Data
`
`3
`
`
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`Case 1:19-cv-00859-RTH Document 8-1 Filed 10/11/19 Page 5 of 239
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`Case 1:17-cv-00933-RGA Document 31 Filed 07/20/18 Page 4 of 30 PageID #: 1875
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`Markup Language including, but not limited to, the Asserted Patents. As discussed below, these
`
`patents provided numerous advantages over prior art Markup Languages.
`
`16.
`
`In the late 1990’s when numbers were treated the same as letters (text) in software
`
`programs, both online and offline, e-Numerate’s key technical advancements allowed numbers to
`
`be substantively treated as the numerical values they represent. This opened the computer world,
`
`both online and offline, to vastly improve a user’s ability to identify, manipulate, compare,
`
`convert and process numbers in software like never before. The technical innovations of the
`
`Patents-in-Suit are embodied in software that improves and enhances the functionalities of
`
`computer systems over the prior art. The problem that they solve relates to the need for the
`
`intelligent identification and processing of numerical information on the Internet.
`
`17.
`
`THE PROBLEM: In the late 1990’s, the Internet was replete with numerical data
`
`but (i) there was no way of distinguishing this numerical data from text, (ii) data and analytic
`
`routines were not standardized, and (iii) calculations occurred at too low a conceptual level.
`
`a. The advances of the inventions claimed in the patents-in-suit relate to deficiencies
`
`in the prior-art markup languages that existed at the time of the invention. These were Hyper
`
`Text Markup Language (HTML) and Extensible Markup Language (XML).
`
`b. Internet browsers interpret and display documents formatted in HTML. In order to
`
`distinguish the text characters to be displayed from the information describing how the text
`
`characters are to be formatted, “annotations” that are not visible to the viewer of the displayed
`
`document are added to the document. The HTML specification describes the use of a markup
`
`language to include these non-displayed annotations. A markup language is a system for
`
`inserting information about the formatting and display of a group of text characters by placing
`
`non-displayed “markup” text before and after the group of text characters. These markups,
`
`4
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`
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`Case 1:19-cv-00859-RTH Document 8-1 Filed 10/11/19 Page 6 of 239
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`Case 1:17-cv-00933-RGA Document 31 Filed 07/20/18 Page 5 of 30 PageID #: 1876
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`commonly known as “tags” in online and other documents in digital format, describe the
`
`structure and formatting of digital documents and instruct computer systems on how to display
`
`them.
`
`c. HTML works only with text and images. Numbers in HTML documents are read
`
`and displayed as text characters. There is no HTML tag capable of annotating the context or
`
`meaning of numerical data appearing in a markup document for computer systems to interpret
`
`these numerical data as numbers representing a particular type of information instead of a simple
`
`string of text characters. At most, HTML tags can be used only to indicate the display format
`
`(e.g., font, size, color, alignment) of numerical data. For example, a financial statement showing
`
`numbers could be displayed by computer systems running browsers, but HTML cannot be used
`
`to annotate a given number as “revenue” or “expense,” or as “dollars” or “Euros,” or as
`
`representing “thousands” or “millions,” but rather only as a text character to be displayed in a
`
`certain way according to embedded formatting tags. Consequently, computer systems running
`
`web browsers could use HTML tags to display documents containing numbers, but the HTML
`
`tags do not enable computer systems to run analytical applications that read, manipulate,
`
`combine, compare, transform or analyze the numbers, load them into a spreadsheet, or display
`
`them in a graph, directly from multiple online sources.
`
`d. XML version 1.0 was developed in the mid-to-late 1990s to help overcome some
`
`of HTML’s limitations. XML, itself, does not include a set of pre-defined tags, but rather is a
`
`specification that governs the creation of tags by particular users or groups. The XML
`
`specification allows developers to create customized tags that, via a glossary of terms, describe
`
`the structure and meaning of online content. In other words, XML allows developers to create
`
`their own individual markup languages. Thus, a user can use XML to create their own markup
`
`5
`
`
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`Case 1:19-cv-00859-RTH Document 8-1 Filed 10/11/19 Page 7 of 239
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`Case 1:17-cv-00933-RGA Document 31 Filed 07/20/18 Page 6 of 30 PageID #: 1877
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`tags that annotate data characteristics that are meaningful to that particular user. But at the time
`
`of the inventions of the patents-in-suit, no set of XML tags had been promulgated for general
`
`use, so any XML tag taxonomy created by one user would not be compatible with the
`
`taxonomies created by other users. One user’s XML tag taxonomy, whether individuals or
`
`groups, is not ordinarily available to any other users or groups of users. XML’s lack of
`
`standardization, and its separation of data and from its annotations (metadata), left users with no
`
`way to manipulate, combine, compare, transform or analyze numerical data from singular or
`
`multiple online sources using differing custom created XML tag taxonomies. The only way to
`
`correct the deficiency of XML was to convert unrelated documents by hand.
`
`18.
`
`THE INVENTION: In contrast to XML, the Reusable Data Markup Language
`
`(“RDML”) represented a significant advance over HTML and XML. The patents at issue in this
`
`case solved these HTML and XML-related problems with unique tools that allowed users for the
`
`first time to easily view, compare and analyze numerical data on the Internet. The Reusable Data
`
`Markup Language (“RDML”) and RDML companion innovations include:
`
`a. Pairing the metadata directly with the numerical data in machine-readable form so
`
`the numerical data could be easily identified and used in different program applications. This
`
`was a dramatically different approach than previously used, which was to keep document
`
`metadata and data itself separate from each other. Without the pairing of metadata directly with
`
`the numerical data as described in the patents-in-suit, the capabilities presented in the XBRL
`
`standard would not be possible.
`
`b. Define standards for both data formats and analytic routines.
`
`6
`
`
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`Case 1:19-cv-00859-RTH Document 8-1 Filed 10/11/19 Page 8 of 239
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`Case 1:17-cv-00933-RGA Document 31 Filed 07/20/18 Page 7 of 30 PageID #: 1878
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`c. Enhance analytical calculation power by creating data objects at the line item and
`
`document levels. This overcame the limitations of traditional spreadsheets which operate only at
`
`the cell (single number) level.
`
`i.
`
`Reusable Data Markup Language provided RDML tags for data
`
`characteristics that HTML lacked and supplied a set of tags for content and meaning of numbers
`
`for general use missing in XML.
`
`ii.
`
`A suite of software applications was developed to create
`
`documents with RDML tag markups, read or parse the RDML documents, display them as
`
`graphs or in tree views, combine and compare data from multiple online sources, and
`
`manipulate, transform and analyze numerical data from multiple online sources. RDML permits
`
`the browsing and manipulation of numbers, and allows the “RDML Data Viewer” to act as a
`
`combination Web browser and spreadsheet/analytic application that automatically read numbers
`
`from multiple online sources, understand their meaning, and manipulate them without human
`
`intervention.
`
`iii.
`
`RDML encodes information about numbers in tags that relate to
`
`each number. The encoded information is connected with the numbers themselves and the tags
`
`move with the numbers when the numbers are ported. By associating the numbers with the
`
`numbers’ attributes and making it machine-readable, RDML facilitates browsing for and
`
`processing numbers.
`
`iv.
`
`The RDML Data Viewer is an “Application” in accordance with
`
`the XML Specifications. The RDML Data Viewer accesses information contained in an XML-
`
`formatted document by invoking the XML Processor to obtain individual data elements based on
`
`their “extended” tags that have been defined in accordance with the “extensibility” features of
`
`7
`
`
`
`Case 1:19-cv-00859-RTH Document 8-1 Filed 10/11/19 Page 9 of 239
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`Case 1:17-cv-00933-RGA Document 31 Filed 07/20/18 Page 8 of 30 PageID #: 1879
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`XML. The RDML Data Viewer automates the process of merging the tagged elements derived
`
`from documents written in different formats and languages into a single, standardized data set.
`
`Where there are conflicts, the RDML Data Viewer automatically resolves the conflicts between
`
`the characteristics of the varying documents to create a standard set of tags using the RDML
`
`taxonomy. The RDML Data Viewer also provides a macro development and management
`
`scheme that allows users to create reusable custom routines for the manipulation, transformation
`
`and display of RDML-formatted data. By defining standards for data characteristics and content-
`
`analysis, RDML addresses the problems caused by XML’s use of customized tagging making
`
`RDML applicable for general use.
`
`19.
`
`The impact of the improvements of the patents-in-suit, are as follows:
`
`a. “Pairing the metadata directly with the numerical data in machine-readable form
`
`so the numerical data could be easily identified and used in different program applications.”
`
`This had never been done before the inventions claimed in the patents-in-suit.
`
`The inventions claimed in the patents-in-suit were invented prior to the creation of the
`
`XBRL standard. Prior art, as embodied in HTML and XML at the time of the filing of the
`
`patents-in-suit, did not provide any metadata (i.e., information about the attributes or
`
`characteristics of a data element) beyond simple display formatting. Without these attributes and
`
`characteristics, it was not possible for a human or a computer to select, process, combine or
`
`output data elements without resorting to human intervention to find, associate and take into
`
`account how the appropriate attributes and characteristics would affect the selection, processing,
`
`combination and outputting activities. For example, financial statements, such as those submitted
`
`to the SEC by Mattress Firm, contain numeric values for typical accounting data items types
`
`such as “Assets”, “Balances”, “Cash”, etc. To organize the multiple occurrences of these items,
`
`8
`
`
`
`Case 1:19-cv-00859-RTH Document 8-1 Filed 10/11/19 Page 10 of 239
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`Case 1:17-cv-00933-RGA Document 31 Filed 07/20/18 Page 9 of 30 PageID #: 1880
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`accountants would create financial statements such as “Balance Sheets”, “Income Statements”,
`
`etc. that typically have formats that hierarchically display and summarize these accounting items
`
`in a manner that reflect how the individual organization or organizational unit represents its
`
`Financial condition. Before the introduction of the inventive concepts contained in the patents-
`
`in-suit, there were no tools that could automatically associate individual accounting data items
`
`with the appropriate sections of the organization’s financial statements. Typically, the
`
`organization would have to rely on its senior financial accountants to manually select, analyze,
`
`combine, and format accounting items in a manner that corresponded to that organization’s
`
`Financial Statement situation. Thus, each iteration of Financial Statement preparation required a
`
`large amount of human intervention n to create a Financial Statement that faithfully adhere to the
`
`“letter” and “intent” of the generally accepted accounting standards due to the lack of a means to
`
`capture and utilize the required metadata. The patents-in-suit provide these capabilities which are
`
`not addressed by either HTML or XML. The continuing significant efforts by the Financial
`
`Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and the XBRL International organization to grow and
`
`expand the Extensible Business Reporting Language are a testament to the necessity and value of
`
`the inventions contained in the patents-in-suit. The SEC is currently performing cross-financial
`
`entity and cross-industry “data mining” activities to better understand financial trends and to
`
`better discover improprieties by comparing financial entities. These activities would not be
`
`possible without the ability of different program applications to utilize the inventions contained
`
`in the patents-in-suit.
`
`b. “Define standards for both data formats and analytic routines.”
`
`Before the introduction of the inventions contained in the patents-in-suit, the
`
`preparation of financial statements involved the manual selection, analysis, combination and
`
`9
`
`
`
`Case 1:19-cv-00859-RTH Document 8-1 Filed 10/11/19 Page 11 of 239
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`Case 1:17-cv-00933-RGA Document 31 Filed 07/20/18 Page 10 of 30 PageID #: 1881
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`outputting of numerical data items based on the best efforts of the organization’s senior
`
`accountants and later accepted as appropriate by Certified Public Accountants. Without defined
`
`standards for capturing and accessing both numerical data attributes and characteristics, the
`
`selection of appropriate data formats and analytic routines could not be performed automatically
`
`by either human or machine. The patents-in-suit provide a mechanism to capture the metadata
`
`required to identify the attributes and characteristics of each numerical data element, and thereby
`
`allow the automated selection of the appropriate analytic routines based on the metadata
`
`associated with those analytical routines. For example, an international organization may operate
`
`in several political jurisdictions, each having their own financial regulations, reporting formats
`
`and analytical processing procedures. For the international organization to produce a combined
`
`Financial Statement of Condition, the financial statement within each jurisdiction must first be
`
`created and then combined into a consolidated financial statement. To facilitate this
`
`consolidation, senior international accountants would have to manually identify the variations
`
`associated with each jurisdiction and determine how these diverse statements of financial
`
`condition could be combined. The inventions contained in the patents-in-suit provide a
`
`mechanism to capture the necessary numerical data item metadata and analytical processing
`
`routine metadata to facilitate the required association of numerical data to routines needed to
`
`automatically produce combined financial statements without manual human intervention.
`
`c. “Enhance analytical calculation power by creating data objects at the line item
`
`and document levels.”
`
`Prior art at the time of the filing of the patent-in-suit only provided for the automated
`
`display of structured data using HTML or XML. While these display structures provided an
`
`elementary “visual” representation of the relationship between the data elements, there was no
`
`10
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`
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`Case 1:19-cv-00859-RTH Document 8-1 Filed 10/11/19 Page 12 of 239
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`Case 1:17-cv-00933-RGA Document 31 Filed 07/20/18 Page 11 of 30 PageID #: 1882
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`standard way of capturing these relationships in a manner that this information could be stored
`
`and accessed by human or automated processes. The patents-in-suit provide a mechanism to
`
`capture and utilize these types of relationships. For example, financial transactions typically
`
`might consist of a date, description, multiple account identifiers (e.g., debit, credit, distribution,
`
`etc.) and amounts for each. In a manual or automated accounting system, these components of a
`
`financial transaction would typically be stored together in an information processing system
`
`(e.g., “data base”). Without the inventions contained in the patents-in-suit there would be no
`
`automated way of unambiguously capturing these elements presented in an HTML or XML
`
`document due to the lack of the necessary metadata.
`
`20.
`
`Further impacts of the key inventions embodied in the Reusable Data Markup
`
`Language (RDML) are identified as follows:
`
`a. “A set of tags to encode attributes and meaning of numbers. RDML encodes
`
`information about numbers in tags that relate to each number. The encoded information is
`
`connected with the numbers themselves and the tags move with the numbers when the numbers
`
`are ported.”
`
`Prior art at the time of the filing of the patents-in-suit did not provide a mechanism to
`
`identify numerical data element attributes, characteristics, formats or relationships. For example,
`
`an information system would typically store structured data, such as financial transactions, in a
`
`“database” system that preserves record or “line item” relationships for a collection of related
`
`transactions (i.e., a business document). Typically, the metadata describing these record and data
`
`element characteristics would be stored in the “schema” subsystem of the database system.
`
`However, there was no universal mechanism to store and share the metadata describing the
`
`structure of the records, the metadata of the individual data elements within each record, the
`
`11
`
`
`
`Case 1:19-cv-00859-RTH Document 8-1 Filed 10/11/19 Page 13 of 239
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`Case 1:17-cv-00933-RGA Document 31 Filed 07/20/18 Page 12 of 30 PageID #: 1883
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`metadata describing the relationship among different records representing a transaction, nor the
`
`semantic meaning of the data elements. For example, an “invoice” might consist of various
`
`information about the supplier (e.g., name, address, tax id, etc.), consumer (e.g., name, address,
`
`tax id, etc.), and individual invoice line items (e.g., item identifier, description, dimensions, cost,
`
`etc.). Without RDML’s encoding of attributes and meaning, each time information from one
`
`information system (manual or automated) was to be shared with another information system, a
`
`“mapping” of all of these data elements had to be manually created. The inventions in the
`
`patents-in-suit provide for automated sharing of the metadata necessary for information to be
`
`shared among information systems without manual intervention.
`
`b. “A suite of applications that create documents with RDML tag markups, read or
`
`parse the RDML documents, display them as graphs or in tree views, combine and compare data
`
`from multiple online sources, and manipulate, transform and analyze numerical data from
`
`multiple online sources.”
`
`The patents-in-suit include the specifications for the implementation of automated
`
`information application systems to provide the benefits of the inventions and the implementation
`
`specifications for the “RDML Data Viewer” describe the mechanisms necessary to provide the
`
`benefits of these inventions. Just as the “dial telephone” enhanced the efficiency and ease of use
`
`of the telephone system beyond that experienced when human operators were necessary to make
`
`a telephone call, the RDML Data Viewer provides for the automated creation and sharing of the
`
`metadata necessary for information systems (manual or computerized) to more efficiently share
`
`and use complex structured information without the necessity for manual creation of “mappings”
`
`each time a new pair of information systems need to share information.
`
`12
`
`
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`Case 1:19-cv-00859-RTH Document 8-1 Filed 10/11/19 Page 14 of 239
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`Case 1:17-cv-00933-RGA Document 31 Filed 07/20/18 Page 13 of 30 PageID #: 1884
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`21.
`
`The inventions of the patents-in-suit have numerous advantages over prior art
`
`systems such as Excel. For example, if a person had an Excel spreadsheet with a column entitled
`
`“pounds” along with numbers in that column the disadvantages of prior art systems are manifest.
`
`For example, without additional metadata, it would not be clear whether the column heading
`
`“Pound” was a unit of measure for the weight of an object or a unit of measure for British
`
`currency. All the ways in which this information in the “Pound” column could be combined for
`
`use in conjunction with other data in the spreadsheet is not indicated since metadata about its
`
`semantic meaning is not available in the spreadsheet itself. While Excel spreadsheets can encode
`
`formulas, formats and relationships, the encoding of this information is unique to the layout of
`
`each individual spreadsheet. When new or different analyses or outputs are required, the
`
`spreadsheet must be manually modified in structure and analytical content to provide the desired
`
`results. While “templates” were available to define generic documents such as invoices, these
`
`must be manually revised to deal with each specific situation since the spreadsheet structure is
`
`not based on the semantic meaning of the numerical data elements nor universal concepts of how
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`the data elements in a specific template can be selected, analyzed, combined and output. The
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`patents-in-suit provide the ability to analyze and share this information among manual and
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`automated information systems by recording both semantic meaning and macros that embody
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`logical tests to select the appropriate processing based on this and other data elements contained
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`in the document.
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`22.
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`The patents-in-suit have particular advantages when dealing with macros. Some
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`analysts considered a macro a “shortcut” which appears to imply the “recorded series of steps”
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`required to achieve a given computation or formatting result. For example, such a “shortcut”
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`might be recorded in spreadsheet “formula” to sum a column of numbers and combine that sum
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`Case 1:19-cv-00859-RTH Document 8-1 Filed 10/11/19 Page 15 of 239
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`Case 1:17-cv-00933-RGA Document 31 Filed 07/20/18 Page 14 of 30 PageID #: 1885
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`with other sums. However, that formula would be only related to the set of cells that the analyst
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`identified during the construction of the formula, and the rationale used in creating that formula
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`would not be recorded in a way that a human or automated process could access or evaluate.
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`RDML standardizes the recording of these steps in a “macro” that includes the identification of
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`the specific data items that these steps apply to by specifying the data element metadata needed
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`to determine which data elements are to be selected and how they are to be processed given their
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`individual attributes and characteristics. Further, RDML stores this information in a “Second
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`Document” (i.e., external file) that is accessible on the Internet so that it can be used by any
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`process related to the specific data elements involved. For example, XBRL uses such external
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`“linkbase” files containing “rules” (i.e., “Macros”) that perform “recorded series of steps” (i.e.,
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`“shortcuts” or “calculations”) but also contain rules for data validation, data element
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`combination and transformation that are based on metadata that identify the attributes and
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`characteristics of the data element (e.g., “Fixed Asset” vs. “Financial Asset”) rather than the
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`specifics of a spreadsheet template. The patents-in-suit invent the solution to the data sharing
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`problem by storing semantically sensitive Macros in universally accessible “second documents”
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`available to all human and automated processor on the Internet.
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`23.
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`The inventions of the patents-in-suit cannot simply be performed “by hand”. The
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`patents-in-suit address the problem of combining information from data elements that are in
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`different formats and units of measure in two different documents. For example, the financial
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`statement for a company’s U.S. and Canadian divisions might record information related to fixed
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`assets in different formats and units of measure. Prior art before the filing of the patents-in-suit
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`would not encode the metadata necessary for a human or automated process to unambiguously
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`identify the attributes and characteristics of similarly named numerical data elements so that
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`14
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`Case 1:19-cv-00859-RTH Document 8-1 Filed 10/11/19 Page 16 of 239
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`Case 1:17-cv-00933-RGA Document 31 Filed 07/20/18 Page 15 of 30 PageID #: 1886
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`these differing data elements could be combined to yield an identified result. The inventions
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`contained in ‘816 patent together with the other patents-in-suit provide for the encoding of the
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`attributes and characteristics in the “First Document” and a mechanism to access the selection,
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`analysis, processing and output formatting information contained in a “Second Document” on
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`the Internet. For a human to perform the required process “by hand” the human would have to
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`have access to the specific set of instructions that would apply to the specific document and data
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`elements to be processed. Without the semantic relationship capabilities invented by the patents-
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`in-suit a human could not unambiguously locate these recorded steps by hand. Even if a human
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`was provided with a document containing the processing steps, prior art did not provide for the
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`encoding of the necessary metadata needed to ensure that, based on the attributes a