Related Matters (37 C.F.R. § 42.8(b)(2)): On March 12, 2016, Activision Blizzard, Inc., Electronic Arts Inc., Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc., 2K Sports, Inc., and Rockstar Games, Inc. (collectively, “Prior Petitioners”) petitioned for inter partes review of claims 1-17 of the ’069 patent (IPR2016-00726), which was denied.
v. Rea, 733 F.3d 1355, 1362 (Fed. Cir. 2013) (obvious analysis must “account for critical background information that could easily explain why an ordinarily skilled artisan would have been motivated to combine or modify the cited references to arrive at the claimed inventions”).
Thus, it would be a natural step for a person of ordinary skill in the art to add rendezvous-host responsibilities to network participants if the added security of a separate rendezvous host is not needed.
A person of ordinary skill in the art seeking to advance Francis’s objective that “each member establishes the same number of mesh links” would have looked to Gilbert for inspiration on how to maintain such a topology while adding new nodes.
Moreover, as described above in connection with claim element [1-E], Gilbert discloses a full range of alternatives for a “portal computer” that, upon a request by a node wishing to join the network, initiates the identification of a pair of participants.