Daedalus Blue LLC v. Katherine K. Vidal, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property

N OTE: This disposition is nonprecedential.
United States Court of Appeals
for the Federal Circuit
______________________
DAEDALUS BLUE LLC,
Appellant
v.
KATHERINE K. VIDAL, UNDER SECRETARY OF
COMMERCE FOR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
AND DIRECTOR OF THE UNITED STATES
PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE,
Intervenor
______________________
2023-1313
______________________
Appeal from the United States Patent and Trademark
Office, Patent Trial and Appeal Board in No. IPR2021-
00831.
______________________
Decided: March 13, 2024
______________________
K EVIN K ENT MCN ISH , McNish PLLC, Portland, ME, ar-
gued for appellant. Also represented by D ENISE M ARIE D E
MORY , Bunsow De Mory LLP, Redwood City, CA.
MICHAEL S. F ORMAN, Office of the Solicitor, United
States Patent and Trademark Office, Alexandria, VA,
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DAEDALUS BLUE LLC v. VIDAL 2
argued for intervenor. Also represented by F ARHEENA
YASMEEN RASHEED, M EREDITH H OPE SCHOENFELD.
______________________
Before T ARANTO, CHEN, and STOLL , Circuit Judges.
CHEN, Circuit Judge.
Daedalus Blue LLC (Daedalus) appeals a Patent Trial
and Appeal Board (Board) decision that determined claims
15–25 of U.S. Patent No. 8,671,132 (’132 patent) are un-
patentable under 35 U.S.C. § 103 over combinations of
Gelb,1 Tivoli,2 and Callaghan.3 We have jurisdiction under
28 U.S.C. § 1295(a)(4)(A).
Daedalus raises three arguments on appeal: (1) the
Board erred by not construing the claim term “plurality of
clients” as “clients in a networked environment”; (2) Gelb
is not analogous art because it is not in the same field of
endeavor as the ’132 patent; and (3) Gelb is not analogous
art because it is not reasonably pertinent to the problems
identified in the ’132 patent. Because substantial evidence
supports the Board’s finding that Gelb is analogous art, we
affirm.
Claim 15 is representative for purposes of this appeal
and recites:
15. A method for handling files within a policy-
based data management system, the method com-
prising:
1 U.S. Patent No. 5,018,060, J.A. 1500–15.
2 Roland Leins, Tivoli Storage Manager: A Technical
Introduction (2d ed. 2001), J.A. 1516–45.
3 Brent Callaghan, NFS Illustrated (2000),
J.A. 1546–57.
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DAEDALUS BLUE LLC v. VIDAL 3
providing a policy set comprising at least one ser-
vice class rule;
receiving one or more attributes of a file from one
of a plurality of clients, the clients comprising at
least two different computing platforms;
applying the service class rule to the file to assign
a service class to the file; and
conducting operations on the file in a manner ac-
cording to the service class.
’132 patent at claim 15 (emphasis added).
We begin with Daedalus’s not-reasonably-pertinent ar-
gument. The Board agreed with Daedalus that one prob-
lem identified in the ’132 patent is “‘not permit[ting] a user
to automatically select between multiple storage options’
and not addressing ‘[files] with varying storage or perfor-
mance requirements or equipment with varying capacities
and performance levels.’” J.A. 22 (first alteration in origi-
nal) (first quoting ’132 patent col. 1 l. 47 – col. 2 l. 3; and
then quoting J.A. 573). Relying in part on Gelb’s specifica-
tion, the Board reasonably found that Gelb addresses the
same problem: “namely that prior art storage access meth-
ods did not permit programmers to write code that would
allow users to automatically select the appropriate storage
devices based on ‘high or logical level’ concepts, such as
‘data sets, data bases and the like.’” J.A. 22 (quoting
J.A. 645); see also J.A. 1504 col. 1 ll. 33–37, 60–65, col. 2
ll. 19–21; J.A. 1512 col. 18 ll. 23–27. Substantial evidence
therefore supports the Board’s finding that Gelb would be
reasonably pertinent to at least one problem identified in
the ’132 patent.
Because the Board’s reasonable-pertinence finding is
supported by substantial evidence, we need not address
Daedalus’s other arguments. Even if Daedalus’s claim-con-
struction argument were correct, that construction would
not undermine the Board’s factual findings for reasonable
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DAEDALUS BLUE LLC v. VIDAL 4
pertinence, as the identified problem is agnostic to whether
the clients are in a networked environment. As to Daeda-
lus’s field-of-endeavor argument, the Board’s reasonable-
pertinence finding was sufficient for Gelb to be analogous
art. See Donner Tech., LLC v. Pro Stage Gear, LLC, 979
F.3d 1353, 1359 (Fed. Cir. 2020) (explaining that a refer-
ence is analogous art if it is either in the same “field of en-
deavor” or “reasonably pertinent to the particular problem
with which the inventor is involved” (quoting In re Bigio,
381 F.3d 1320, 1325 (Fed. Cir. 2004))).
We have considered Daedalus’s remaining arguments
and find them unpersuasive. For the foregoing reasons, we
affirm.
AFFIRMED
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