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`UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
`____________
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`BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD
`____________
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`CXLOYALTY, INC.,
`Petitioner,
`
`v.
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`MARITZ HOLDINGS INC.,
`Patent Owner.
`____________
`
`Case CBM2018-00037
`Patent 7,134,087 B2
`____________
`
`Record of Oral Hearing
`Held: September 17, 2019
`____________
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`
`
`
`Before MICHAEL R. ZECHER, JUSTIN T. ARBES, and
`JON B. TORNQUIST, Administrative Patent Judges.
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`Case CBM2018-00037
`Patent 7,134,087 B2
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`APPEARANCES:
`
`ON BEHALF OF THE PETITIONER:
`
`
`STEVEN M. LIEBERMAN, ESQUIRE
`RICHARD WYDEVEN, ESQUIRE
`LAWSON ALLEN, ESQUIRE
`Rothwell, Figg, Ernst & Manbeck, P.C.
`607 14th Street, N.W., Suite 800
`Washington, D.C 20005
`202-783-6040
`rwydeven@rfem.com
`slieberman@rfem.com
`
`
`
`ON BEHALF OF THE PATENT OWNER:
`
`
`ROBERT M. EVANS, JR., ESQUIRE
`KYLE GOTTUSO, ESQUIRE
`Stinson, LLP
`7700 Forsyth Boulevard, Suite 1100
`St. Louis, Missouri 63105
`314-863-0800
`robert.evans@stinson.com
`
`
`
`
`The above-entitled matter came on for hearing on Tuesday, September
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`17, 2019, commencing at 1:04 p.m., at the U.S. Patent and Trademark
`Office, 600 Dulany Street, Alexandria, Virginia.
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`Case CBM2018-00037
`Patent 7,134,087 B2
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`P R O C E E D I N G S
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`JUDGE ARBES: Good afternoon. This is the Oral Hearing in Case
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`CBM2018-00037 involving Patent 7,134,087. Can counsel please state their
`names for the record?
`MR. LIEBERMAN: Steven Lieberman and Lawson Allen, and my
`colleague Richard Wydeven, for the Petitioner.
`MR. EVANS: Robert Evans, Your Honor. Here for the Patent
`Owner, Maritz Holdings, with my colleague, Kyle Gottuso. And also here
`today is Steve Gallant, our General Counsel.
`JUDGE ARBES: Thank you. Per the Trial Hearing Order, each party
`will have 60 minutes of time to present arguments. And the order of
`presentation is, first, Petitioner will present its case regarding the alleged
`unpatentability of the challenged claims and proposed substitute claims in
`Patent Owner's motion to amend. Petitioner may reserve time for rebuttal,
`but no more than 30 minutes.
`Patent Owner then will respond to Petitioner's presentation and
`present its case as to whether the motion to amend meets the requirements of
`37 C.F.R. 42.211. Patent Owner may reserve time for rebuttal, but no more
`than 15 minutes.
`Petitioner then may use any remaining time to respond to Patent
`Owner, and finally Patent Owner may use any of its remaining time for a
`brief surrebuttal, responding to Petitioner's rebuttal arguments.
`Two reminders before we begin. To ensure that the transcript is clear,
`please try to refer to your demonstratives by slide number. And also if either
`party believes that the other party is presenting an improper argument, I
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`would ask you to please raise that during your own presentation rather than
`objecting at the time and interrupting the other side.
`Any questions before we begin?
`MR. EVANS: No, Your Honor.
`MR. LIEBERMAN: No, Your Honor.
`JUDGE ARBES: Thank you. Counsel for Petitioner, you may
`proceed. And would you like to reserve time for rebuttal?
`MR. LIEBERMAN: I would, Your Honor. Unless I'm more verbose
`than I intend to be on my initial presentation, I'd like to reserve 30 minutes
`for rebuttal, please.
`Judge Arbes, and may it please the Board. My name is Steve
`Lieberman. In this Board's institution decision, the Panel concluded that the
`Petitioner, which is now known as CxLoyalty, Inc., had demonstrated that
`it's more likely than not, that each of the 15 original claims in the 087 Patent
`are unpatentable for failing to meet the eligibility requirements of Section
`101.
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`The principal Section 101 questions for this trial, I submit fall into
`two broad categories. First, did the Board err in the preliminary conclusions
`set forth in the institution decision? Or does the evidence submitted by the
`party subsequent to the institution decision or compel a different result with
`respect to the original claims? Our view, you might not be surprised to
`learn, is that you did not err, and that the subsequent evidence makes no
`difference with respect to your preliminary conclusion.
`The second category of issues is whether a different conclusion
`regarding eligibility should apply with respect to the proposed substitute
`claims. And in connection with that second point, I intend to address the
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`difference in the claims between the substitute claims and the original
`claims. The 2019 guidance that came out in January after the institutional
`ruling including example 42 which is a focus of some of the submissions
`from Maritz, and the second Weiner declaration which was the only
`additional evidence that was submitted after the institution decision.
`So those are the questions upon which I principally intend to focus on
`the initial presentation. Let me begin with the 087 Patent itself. The first
`sentence of the abstract of the patent describes it as a system for permitting a
`participant to transact the purchase using awarded points with a vendor
`system which transacts purchases in currency.
`Of course, in our analysis we are going to be focusing on the claims.
`In its institution decision this Board explained that the claims as a whole
`were directed to the abstract idea of facilitating or brokering a commercial
`transaction between the purchaser, using a first forum of value that would be
`points and that seller transacting in the second form of value which would be
`currency or money.
`As the Board correctly concluded in the institution decision
`those claims were similar to the claims that the Supreme Court and held to
`be ineligible in both Bilski and Alice, and I would note that in the Alice
`case, the patent had as one of the claim elements something that the
`Supreme Court called shadow records.
`And I would submit I'll talk about this in a little more detail
`later, that shadow records are very similar to the program account upon
`which Maritz relies very heavily, this program account which I say is hidden
`from the participants, and is intended to hide from the participants, or
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`deceive the participants too as to the ultimate value of the rewards that
`they're getting from the vendor.
`In addition, the Board preliminarily concluded that the claims
`of the 087 Patent more a relevant similarity to those at issue in the Loyalty
`Conversion and the Kroy decisions, which were decisions issued by Federal
`Circuit Judge Bryson who was sitting by designation as a District Court
`Judge in the Eastern District of Texas in both of those cases.
`The Loyalty Conversion -- I'm sorry -- the Kroy decision was
`also affirmed by the Federal Circuit on appeal. The discussion of those
`cases, as the Board knows, is a detailed one and can be found at page 28 and
`29 of the institution decision, including the Board's observation that Judge
`Bryson had found the claims in the Loyalty Conversion case to be directed
`to the abstract idea of converting loyalty award points of one vendor, into
`loyalty award points of another, i.e. a currency exchange, which I would
`submit is very close to what we have here.
`In the institution decision, this panel relied on the 087 Patent
`specification, it also relied in part on the declaration of Mr. Knowles, the
`expert for Petitioners, which described how prior to the 087 Patent
`participants in loyalty programs would purchase flights through a travel
`agent unassociated with the loyalty program, the participants' point balances
`would be deducted by the appropriate amount, the travel clearinghouse
`would bill the travel agency's account for the amount of the transaction in
`currency, and the travel agency would invoice the loyalty program for the
`amount.
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`There appears to be no dispute about any of this, and I would
`note that Maritz never deposed Mr. Knowles. So, Mr. Knowles' testimony
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`stands unrebutted as to what he said except to the extent that there's a
`conflict between what Mr. Knowles said Mr. Weiner said. And again I'll get
`to that point. But they chose not to depose him, so all of those initial issues
`that they raised about the credibility of Mr. Knowles given that he was an
`employee of the Petitioner, I would say have gone by the wayside.
`They could have cross-examined him on that, they chose not to.
`And, frankly, it's not much of a surprise that they chose not to, since his
`statements are largely undisputed, they were based on documents that were
`attached to his declaration, and largely base on his personal knowledge.
`Now, with respect of Mr. Weiner, he had stated in his first
`declaration that loyalty programs that had been in use since at least the 18th
`Century, I would venture to speculate the loyalty programs have been in use
`since at least Ancient Phoenicia, but we don't need to go that far to meet our
`burdens in this case so we'll take the 18th Century.
`And at paragraph 60 and paragraph 88 of his first declaration,
`Mr. Weiner essentially describes loyalty programs performing in a non-
`automated fashion, a non-automated fashion the functions of the claim
`processor, the GUI and the API.
`And the specification makes clear that the purpose of the
`invention -- I'm sorry, it's paragraph 60 and paragraph 68, not 88. The
`specification of the 087 Patent makes clear that the purpose of the invention
`is to eliminate human intervention in redeeming awards when a vendor wish
`to be paid in currency, and using computers to do it faster.
`If you look at the screen you'll see slide number 5, at the very
`bottom there's an opportunity to eliminate at the human intervention to
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`redeem such awards by allowing the customer to systematically redeem their
`points for rewards using redemption vendors that otherwise deal in currency.
`So, that's what we really have here. We have --
`JUDGE ZECHER: Can I ask you a follow-up question on that?
`MR. LIEBERMAN: Of course.
`JUDGE ZECHER: I mean, obviously we've read the patent and
`we know the background. Is that the only problem you view that they're
`trying to address here? Or is there any other problem that you could glean
`from reading the specification that maybe would come to light, such as
`maybe conversion of data in some unspecified way?
`MR. LIEBERMAN: So, I'm not sure that the problem is
`articulated in the specification, but they do talk a lot in their papers about the
`difficulty of having the system that, for example, Sabre, which was a system
`that was used by the airlines, communicate with essentially the retail
`customer on the other end, that it was complicated, and in a different format
`than what would be easily understandable to the ultimate customer.
`And in the substitute claims, as I think Your Honor's question
`(inaudible), they put in the word "conversion." Now, I think we know why
`they put it in. They put it in because of example 42, and they talk in the
`substitute claims about converting the format that the vendors use to a
`format that would be readily usable by the consumer.
`But the point here as I talk only in functional terms, there's
`nothing in the patent specification or in the original claims which tells you
`how you do that conversion. It doesn’t tell you how to make the conversion
`better, it doesn’t give you software for it, it doesn’t tell you anything other
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`than that you should convert. I would say that this is -- and by the way, I'm
`not even sure the specification goes that far, this is their argument.
`It would be no different than if I were going to claim a method
`of allowing people who speak English in the United States to communicate
`with people who speak only French in France. There are two ways that they
`could do that, one is they could write a patent application that had a
`specification that had a translation engine, and provided some improvement
`over the translation engines that existed at the time, better software, better
`hardware, something of that sort.
`Or, I could just say, take the English language run it through a
`conversion engine, and it will translate things into French, and then the
`person in France can read it. I would say, that's all that their specification --
`that's all that their specification does, and that's all their claims do. At the
`very most, say, take something that's in one format and convert it.
`JUDGE ZECHER: So, is it fair to say then your position would
`be that their specification doesn’t contemplate some new or unique way of
`converting the data that's necessary to kind of invoke the system, this reward
`system?
`
`MR. LIEBERMAN: That's correct.
`JUDGE ZECHER: Okay.
`MR. LIEBERMAN: That's absolutely -- well, I don't know
`what the inventors contemplated, what I know is what the specification says.
`The specification doesn’t state or imply any sort of improvement in the
`technology, improvement to the computer.
`JUDGE ZECHER: Well, then what weight should we give to
`Dr. Weiner's second declaration, where I believe in some spots he does, and
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`kind of fills in the blanks for us here, that says, well, they are trying to
`improve this conversion? I notice that you guys did not dispose Dr. Weiner
`on his second declaration, so as it stands that testimony is unrebutted. How
`should we weigh that?
`MR. LIEBERMAN: So, first, let me deal with the assumption in your
`question, and then let me answer the question directly. The assumption was
`that Weiner's declaration stands unrebutted. It does not, for at least two
`reasons. One, the Knowles declaration remains on the record, and the
`Knowles declaration was very clear, as I pointed out before, as to what was
`known in the prior art, what had been done before. Number two --
`JUDGE ZECHER: I get that. But Knowles doesn’t actually testify to
`the new proposed substitute claims.
`MR. LIEBERMAN: No. He doesn’t.
`JUDGE ZECHER: He never had those before him when formulated
`his declaration. Correct?
`MR. LIEBERMAN: No, he doesn’t. But he does talk about what the
`art was at the time and what was known, and that is unrebutted. Number
`two, to the extent that Weiner's declaration is conclusory, well, this Panel
`knows what to do with conclusory statements. So, let's take a look at sort of
`the heart of Weiner's second declaration. That would be I think in paragraph
`27 to 29 of the declaration in support of the motion to amend.
`He says that: prior to the invention, it was not known how to assemble
`the necessary components to build the claimed invention to connect loyalty
`participants who wish to make points-based purchases to vendor systems, in
`such a way that the participants communicate with the vendor systems, in
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`the vendor specific format, and the vendors sell their products/services only
`for currency.
`Let's assume that that's true. All right, let's, for purposes of argument,
`let's assume that that statement is true. What does it get you? The point is
`that the 087 Patent doesn’t fix that issue, because it doesn’t tell you how to
`do the conversion. Weiner's declaration only says: it was hard to have one
`system talk to another system.
`Okay. I've been to France, it's hard for me to talk to people who don't
`speak English, and if I say in a patent application, use the translation engine,
`that doesn’t get me anywhere, it simply abstract, and Weiner's statement in
`paragraphs 27 to 29, doesn’t rebut that point at all. He never says that this
`specification tells you how to do this in a way that improves the function in
`the computer, that improves the function in the system, he just says -- it
`says: have them talk to each other and do a conversion. So what?
`JUDGE ARBES: Counsel, can I ask follow-up question? It seems to
`me that the problem as characterized by the Patent Owner and Mr. Weiner is
`a little bit different. In paragraph 27 of Exhibit 2005, Mr. Weiner says, "One
`technical challenge involved in developing such a platform was that third-
`party Internet vendor systems often communicated in vendor-specific
`formats, " plural.
`So there were multiple vendors communicating in their own specific
`formats, and there was a challenge in having a system that could
`communicate with all of them automatically. Not having a human do it,
`having a system that was capable of communicating with them all.
`So, it's not just translating from English to French, it's translating from
`English to French, to German, and other languages, for instance, but that's
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`the challenge that had to be solved. So it's a little bit different I think than
`what you're characterizing it.
`MR. LIEBERMAN: I would say not in any relevant way, and here is
`why. He doesn’t tell you how to do any of that. If I said, I'm going on a
`multi-country vacation. I'm going to France, and then I'm going to Scotland,
`and they speak a very different kind of English in Scotland than I do. And I
`want an engine that's going to allow me to speak to somebody in France, and
`somebody to speak to somebody in the northern parts of Scotland, or to be a
`little less glib. You know, let's say I was going to Norway to Germany, it
`doesn’t make it any less abstract to say, there should be a way of talking to
`people in these two different countries.
`JUDGE ARBES: So, what in your view would need to be added to
`the claim to make it eligible then? If you're trying to solve this technical
`challenge, you need details of how to communicate with specific systems. Is
`that really necessary for eligibility?
`MR. LIEBERMAN: Well, I don't think this claim -- these claims
`could be amended in any way to make them eligible. And that's because the
`specification does not provide any basis on which you could have claims
`which would cover an improvement to the technology, an improvement to
`the computer.
`And we have a case directly on point here. After the PTO came out
`with example 42 on, I think, January 7th of this year, the Federal Circuit
`decided the University of Florida case. And in the University of Florida
`case the Federal Circuit made very clear, and let's -- so neither the patent nor
`its claims explain how the drivers do the conversion that UFRF points to.
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`That is the drivers are described in purely functional terms, and the claim
`was found to be ineligible.
`The same thing in the In re Greenstein case which came out in July,
`the claims do not provide any concrete solutions that they provide functional
`results, oriented limitations like others we have held to be directed to
`abstract ideas. And there are half-a-dozen other cases that we cited in our
`papers, and I can run through them with the Panel, but I know you're
`familiar with them.
`The point is, the claiming language in the substitute claims is merely
`functional language, there is nothing that Weiner says along the lines of:
`boy, this solves the problem. It solves the problem because it tells you how
`to make the computer work better. It tells you how to make the system work
`better. It's solely aspirational, it's solely functional language.
`Now you may ask, do you have to conclude that example 42 has been
`overruled by the Federal Circuit in the University of Florida case to get
`there, because I know that you have to deal with example 42, and I would
`submit that it has been overruled, but you don't have to reach that point.
`JUDGE ARBES: Before we move on to example 42.
`MR. LIEBERMAN: Yeah.
`JUDGE ARBES: Can I ask -- how do you respond to Patent Owner's
`argument that this does not -- the Florida case does not establish a per se rule
`regarding conversion, because there was conversion in cases like DDR, that
`did convert data, and were found to be eligible?
`MR. LIEBERMAN: Yeah. So, DDR is a very different case, and let
`me -- and let me explain exactly why, using the words of that court, and the
`words of Judge Bryson, since I assume that you'll give more weight to either
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`the Federal Circuit or Judge Bryson than to me, but then I'm happy to
`expand on it.
`Judge Bryson said in the Kroy decision, that DDR Holdings "dealt
`with the patent that required doing something to a webpage, not simply
`doing something on a webpage, a difference that the Court regarded as
`highly important to the issue of patent eligibility."
`The DDR decision itself said the claims specify how interactions with
`the Internet are manipulated to yield the result that overwrites the routine
`and conventional sequence of events, ordinarily triggered by the click of a
`hyperlink. The problem there was one that -- as the Court pointed out, and
`subsequent decisions have as well, was one created by the Internet.
`What the inventors were trying to deal with was an Internet-created
`problem, that the people would be on a webpage, and they would click
`something, and go away from the webpage, and the people who had the
`webpage didn’t want that to happen. So they found a way to keep them on
`the webpage but make it look as if they had gone somewhere else. This was
`a technological improvement to the webpage itself, and it was a
`technological improvement solving a technological problem that had been
`created by the Internet.
`What do we have here in terms of what the problem is? I would
`submit that if you look at their slides, pages 16 to 20, maybe we can just pull
`them up, you'll see that the problem that they talk about, and that Weiner
`talks about, is purely a business problem. And the business problem is, how
`do you take something that was done before and automate it to make it
`faster? And then with this program account, how do you arrange for the
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`intermediated exchange of currency in a way that the buyer does not know
`how much the vendor was actually paid for what it gets.
`And I would say that's exactly like what happens any time you go into
`a store. You go into a furniture store and you want to order furniture to
`furnish your apartment, you want a desk which is going to come from some
`place in North Carolina, you want a mattress which is going to come from
`some mattress company, you want a rug which is going to come from a
`dealer, you know, who gets the rug from, you know, Afghanistan or China.
`You're putting in your request to purchase, and you're doing it in
`dollars, that request is then going out from the API, from the furniture store
`to these three suppliers, maybe the company that sells the rugs only wants to
`be paid in whatever the local currency ism, so you’ve got to have a currency
`conversion. And in any event, the furniture store owner is never going to
`tell you how much he pays for the rug, or for the desk or for the bed. That's
`the same as a hidden program account.
`So, let me get back to your question. This is slide 16 from their slides,
`"Loyalty programs need to demonstrate value to the businesses that took
`advantage of them." For physical merchandise to loyalty program needs to
`acquire and fulfill the merchandise at a much cost, and a consumer could
`acquire and fulfill over the normal purchase channels. For airline seats the
`example often used is the value of an empty airline seat, a customer will
`believe the value of the seat is near what they might have paid or it while the
`airline -- or to the airline the variable cost of adding a person to an empty
`seat is quite low.
`So let's go to the next slide. Weiner, you know, continues -- let's to go
`the next slide, 17 -- 18.
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`Case CBM2018-00037
`Patent 7,134,087 B2
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`COUNSEL: I'm sorry. It's not showing up in here.
`JUDGE ZECHER: We have the slides in front of us, maybe you want
`to continue.
`MR. LIEBERMAN: Sure. So in paragraph 57 of the Weiner
`declaration, which is at slide 18, Weiner says again, "The reason for the
`desire to hide the nature of the transaction from the participant is that loyalty
`rewards programs strive to produce the greatest perceived value to the
`participant for the least amount of cost."
`And the next paragraph, he says, "For example, the loyalty program
`might advertise a reward for 5 points, the operator of the loyalty reward
`program would then aggressively negotiate with the vendor to make the
`purchase $2.50. If the participant saw the actual price paid by the loyalty
`reward program, the participant's perception of the loyalty reward program
`would diminish and the reward program would be less successful."
`That's not a technical problem. That's not a problem with how the
`computer operates, or the system operates, that's a business problem, and not
`only is it a business problem it's a problem that merchants have been dealing
`with since the first time anybody sold great mammoth meat. You know,
`from one cave to another, this is -- nobody -- no middleman will ever tell a
`consumer what they actually paid. This is an abstract business problem.
`JUDGE ARBES: Counsel, I think we understand your arguments
`about the hidden account. Can we maybe focus on the amended claims, and
`specifically the vendor-specific formats and converting the information that
`we are communicating with different vendors?
`MR. LIEBERMAN: Of course.
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`Case CBM2018-00037
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`JUDGE ARBES: Why was that not a technical problem with a
`technical solution?
`MR. LIEBERMAN: All right. Let's put up Maritz's slide 56. So I
`want to start with Maritz's slide 56, which is the first slide that they have
`where they deal with claim 16. Their first substitute -- for a substitute claim,
`and I think it's useful to use this slide because we take Maritz three principle
`arguments, and I think that can be dealt with fairly quickly.
`The first argument is, and they say claim 16 recites explicit technical
`terms for how the API and the GUI communicate. The first point is the GUI
`receives the information via an Internet connection. We know that doesn’t
`make something eligible that wasn’t previously eligible, and we know that
`because we have a case directly on point, the Ultramercial v. Hulu case says
`that.
`
`Number two, the API receives vendor -related information in a format
`of the vendor system, and provides it to the GUI, so I think that's the point,
`Your Honor, that you were addressing, the format of the vendor system.
`So we know, and you quoted this language in your institution
`decision, that the API performs its standard functions. We know that GUI --
`there's no specificity about the GUI in the patent specification, that GUI is,
`you know, is described in functional terms, it's an interface that
`communicates what the individuals that are communicating with it.
`The processors don't do anything special. So, what do you have when
`you have the vendor which might be an airline, that's communicating in a
`fashion that would be hard for the end user to understand? And let me take
`the single best language for them in the specification, although they don't
`really focus on it in the briefs, and that's the word XML Agent, which
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`Case CBM2018-00037
`Patent 7,134,087 B2
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`appears at column 7 of the patent. In column 7 of the patent, there's the
`following line, "The GUI core application 310 also interfaces with an XML
`Agent 316 to convert information provided by the Sabre host, that's the
`vendor, the Sabre host system into XML."
`Okay. So what? It was in a format that wasn’t XML, you say use and
`XML agent to convert it into XML. That's about as functional as language
`gets. I asked some of my electrical engineer colleagues what and XML
`agent was the first I had to deal with this. They said, it would be something
`that, as the function of converting something that's not in XML to something
`that's an XML.
`It doesn’t tell you how to do it. It doesn’t tell you how to do it better,
`it just says -- it's just like the translation engine in my example. I'm going to
`France, use a translation engine to convert English to French. That's all they
`said, XML agent, they didn’t tell you how to do it, they didn’t tell you how
`to make it better. It's very different than, you know, basking, it's very
`different than DDR.
`And I would submit that it's completely different than what the PTO
`anticipated with respect to example 42. Not that I really care what example
`42 says, because think it's no longer with law after the University of Florida,
`but even if it were, example 42 talks about an invention which includes an
`invention about how to convert information.
`Well, I've got to assume that the specification which isn't in the
`example, told you how to do that. It can't possibly be, that just by saying the
`word convert, converted from Sabre language to XML language, which is
`language that's ordinarily used on the Internet. I understand it's taking data
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`and putting it in a structure, that can fit into XML language, it can't be that
`typically using the word convert would be sufficient.
`JUDGE ARBES: But that level of detail that you're talking about,
`about how you do the conversion, that's not in claim 1 of example 42. The
`converting limitation there does not have the level of detail that you're
`saying is required.
`MR. LIEBERMAN: No. It's not in claim 1, but we don't the
`specification for example 42, so I would submit one of two things. It's either
`in a nonexistent specification that we don't have, or example 42 -- and then
`the example must have contemplated it, because it says, this was the
`invention. The invention was directed to the conversion.
`JUDGE ZECHER: But doesn’t the background contemplate that?
`When we read example 42, if you read the background, I'm assuming that
`the background must pull snippets from the specification now that the
`guidance itself doesn’t tell us that. But it certainly does suggest that the
`conversion is a focal point of the invention, and that's the improvement or
`problem they're addressing, right?
`MR. LIEBERMAN: Your Honor, you're exactly right, and if you
`look at the background that's at page 17 of Exhibit 1014, it says, "To solve
`this problem, application has invented a network-based patient management
`method that collects, converts and consolidates patient information from
`various physicians and health care providers into a standardized format.
`So, from that summary, I've got to assume that by saying that it was
`an invention regarding the conversion is, there must have been something in
`the specification about how you do that. If all it said was, converted from
`one format into another, that's plainly an abstract i
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