Unwired Planet International Ltd v huawei Technologies Company, Ltd and Others Unwired Planet, Inc. Unwired Planet LLC (Ninth Party) Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson (Tenth Party Eleventh Party)

JurisdictionEngland & Wales
JudgeMr Justice Birss
Judgment Date02 January 2016
Neutral Citation[2016] EWHC 94 (Pat)
Date02 January 2016
CourtChancery Division (Patents Court)
Docket NumberCase No: HP-2014-000005

[2016] EWHC 94 (Pat)

IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE

CHANCERY DIVISION

PATENTS COURT

Royal Courts of Justice, Rolls Building,

Fetter Lane, London, EC4A 1NL

Before:

The Hon. Mr Justice Birss

Case No: HP-2014-000005

Between:
Unwired Planet International Limited
Claimant
and
(1) huawei Technologies Co., Limited
(2) huawei Technologies (UK) Co., Limited
(3) Samsung Electronics Co., Limited
(4) Samsung Electronics (UK) Limited
Defendants

and

Unwired Planet, Inc. Unwired Planet LLC
Ninth Party

and

Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson
Tenth Party Eleventh Party

Richard Meade QC, Isabel Jamal and Janni Riordan (instructed by EIP Europe) for Unwired Planet

Daniel Alexander QC and James Abrahams (instructed by Powell Gilbert) for Huawei

Mark Vanhegan QC and Nicholas Saunders (instructed by Bristows) for Samsung

Hearing dates: 2 nd, 3 rd, 4 th, 7 th, 9 th, 10 th, 14 th and 15 th December 2015

Mr Justice Birss

Topic

Paragraph

Introduction

1

The witnesses

19

The skilled person / team

27

Common general knowledge

30

The patents

60

Claim construction

71

Obviousness

77

Qualcomm

81

Common general knowledge alone

152

Sufficiency

153

Added matter

156

Clarity

166

Conclusion

180

Introduction

1

This is another judgment in a mobile telecommunications patent case involving Unwired Planet as claimant and Samsung and Huawei as defendants. It arises from the second of five technical trials scheduled to take place between 2015 and 2016. All six technical trials relate to Unwired Planet's patent portfolio, most of which it obtained from Ericsson. In the context of the wider dispute between the parties, this trial is referred to as "Trial B". The judgment in the first technical trial ("Trial A"), [2015] EWHC 3366 (Pat), was handed down in November 2015. The issues in the two trials are entirely distinct.

2

Trial B concerns two patents, EP 2 119 287 (287) and EP 2 485 514 (514), both entitled "Self configuring and optimisation of cell neighbours in wireless telecommunications networks". 514 is a divisional of 287. The patents are based on an original application filed on 28 th February 2007. No earlier priority is claimed. The patents were granted on 13 th November 2013 (287) and 18 th December 2013 (514).

3

The patents are concerned with a scheme relating to neighbour cell lists. In fact some of the claims may be broader than that but the case has focussed on this aspect and it is convenient to consider it in those terms. A neighbour cell list is a list relating to one cell which identifies the neighbouring cells in a cellular network.

4

Telecommunications networks are comprised of a large number of cells. Each cell has a base station connected to the overall network on the land side. The mobile telephones transmit and receive radio signals to and from the base station. In the recent standards the phones are referred to as the "User Equipment" or UE. I will use the word "phone", recognising that in modern telecommunications networks some UEs are not phones at all. For the purposes of this case that does not matter.

5

The identity of cells can be characterised by different "identifiers" which may be unique or non-unique. Broadly the difference between non-unique and unique identifiers is obvious. As the name suggests a unique identifier is one which distinguishes each cell from every other possible cell whereas a non-unique identifier does not. One might wonder why anyone uses non-unique identifiers at all but there are good reasons for it.

6

In order to illustrate the point, imagine a simplistic example of a cellular system in which the base station in a cell transmits its main control channel on a given frequency and in which there are 30 possible frequencies which may be used. The operator will plan the cells in the network so that adjacent cells always use different frequencies. If each cell has no more than six neighbours (imagine a simplistic hexagonal arrangement of cells), then with luck and careful planning the availability of 30 possible frequencies will be enough to avoid problems. Across the network as a whole, with hundreds of cells, these frequencies will be reused many times and so the frequency cannot uniquely identify the cell. The network as a whole will no doubt use a serial number to uniquely identify each cell but, from the point of view of a given cell, the base station control channel frequency is sufficiently unique in its local environment to unambiguously identify each neighbouring cell. A phone in a cell can readily detect the neighbouring cells by tuning its radio receiver to the right frequency and a phone can be instructed which neighbouring cell to connect to by being told which frequency to tune to. So the frequency in this example is a simple and practical way of unambiguously identifying neighbouring cells locally. This kind of identifier can be called a PCI or physical cell identifier. In a CDMA system like UMTS (3G) the PCI is a primary scrambling code (PSC) rather than a frequency but the principle is the same. In the LTE (4G) system the PCI is a synchronisation code.

7

A useful neighbour cell list can be simply a list of PCIs. The fact they are strictly non-unique does not matter. In this simplistic example neither the phone nor the base station needs to know what the unique serial number of the neighbouring cell is. A cell might broadcast its unique serial number in its control channel but a phone wanting to read the unique serial number would necessarily already have had to find out the control frequency or other PCI on the way to doing so. Therefore obtaining such a unique serial number will always be a more involved exercise than obtaining the PCI (there is a dispute about how much more effort is really required and its significance).

8

The invention described in the patents operates in the following way. A list of neighbour cells for a base station is stored in the network. However local circumstances around this first base station might change so that new neighbours come to light. One example could be that a building has been demolished so that the signals from a nearby base station which were hitherto blocked by the building are now strong and high quality in the first base station's cell. Another example is that an entirely new base station has been installed nearby and it has started working. In both examples the new base station is not on the first base station's neighbour cell list but is or has become a feasible neighbour to which phones could be handed over. The invention allows the first base station to update its neighbour cell list taking into account these new neighbours. It allows the network to configure itself in that respect. This sort of thing did not happen in GSM (2G) or UMTS (3G). The neighbour cell lists were provided to base stations from the network.

9

In the LTE (4G) system base stations (called eNode Bs) are all present in an IP network and they can have direct connections between one another in order to facilitate handover. These are called transport connections and operate across the X2 interface in LTE. In order for one eNode B to set up such a transport connection to another, it needs to know the IP address of the neighbour and to find that out it uses the unique identifier.

10

The patents require the mobile phone to "determine parameters for the surrounding cells", such as by measuring the transmission power and quality of the surrounding cells it can detect. When the phone reports these to the base station the relevant non-unique identifiers are used to identify the cells. If the mobile phone reports a non-unique identifier to the base station that is not on the base station's list of neighbouring cells, the base station instructs the mobile phone to retrieve the unique identifier of the neighbour cell. The mobile phone retrieves the unique identifier and transmits it to the base station. The base station can use the unique identifier to find out the IP address of the new neighbour, set up a new transport connection to that neighbour and can update its list of neighbour cells accordingly.

11

The patents have been declared as essential to the LTE 4G telecommunications system. Unwired Planet alleges that Huawei and Samsung infringe the patents by manufacturing and selling equipment that operates in accordance with the LTE standard specified in 3GPP TS 36.300. The relevant functionality is referred to as "Automatic Neighbour Relations" or "ANR". Unwired Planet contends that the patents are essential to the standard and, therefore, Huawei and Samsung's compliance with the standard means they infringe. By the closing there was no dispute that for any of the claims alleged to be independently valid by Unwired Planet, if that claim is valid then it is infringed and essential to the standard.

12

Huawei and Samsung argue that the patents are invalid. Before trial the arguments advanced by the defendants differed to some extent but by the closing they were identical. The defendants' grounds of invalidity narrowed very significantly in the period up to trial. A number of citations were dropped just before trial. Citations which had been relied on but were dropped were two versions of the 3G RRC Protocol Specification (Release 1999), being 3GPP TS 25.331 v3.3.0 and v3.4.0, and two patent applications WO 02/ 43430 (Jansson) and WO 99/ 17571 (Olofsson)

13

The case at trial focussed on obviousness over two starting points:

i) Document R2–062303 ("Qualcomm") which had been proposed by Qualcomm as part of the LTE standardisation discussions. It was presented to the 3GPP TSG-RAN WG-2 meeting #54 which took place in Tallinn, Estonia between August 28-September 1 2006.

ii) Common general knowledge alone.

14

There are also the following further allegations which need to be...

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