2008),[1] was a patent infringement case which determined whether technical documents placed on a company's FTP server could be considered prior art as defined by 35 U.S.C.
The EMERALD paper was presented to the National Information Systems Security Conference (NISSC) as "Event Monitoring Enabling Responses to Anomalous Live Disturbances".
[13] EMERALD was described as a new approach to network surveillance with a streamlined event-analysis system combining signature analysis with statistical profiling.
Furthermore, SRI's FTP site had been referenced by Google Groups and was widely regarded as a repository of information for computer security.
Robinson deemed the Live Traffic paper publicly accessible as established by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in the precedent cases In re Bayer,[9] In re Hall,[10] In re Cronyn,[11] and In re Klopfenstein.
[1] Writing for the majority, Chief Judge Randall R. Rader upheld the District Court's decision that the '212' patent was enabled by the EMERALD paper and therefore invalid.
In the "library/thesis" line of cases, the Federal Circuit had set precedents regarding how the storage of documents affected their accessibility to persons interested and skilled in the field, and thus their status as prior art.
As elements of both storage and dissemination occurred in SRI International, Rader's analysis attempted to determine where the case stood in relation to these precedents.
Rader also cited the Federal Circuit case In re Cronyn, in which a thesis was placed in a library and indexed by the author's last name, and was determined not to qualify as a printed publication.
His analysis likened the uncatalogued nature of the thesis in the library to the posting of the Live Traffic paper on an FTP server which did not allow for searching and did not contain an index.
Moreover, Rader argued that the public accessibility was less compelling for SRI International than it was for In re Bayer, as the document in the former case was in pre-publication review, while the thesis in the latter had already been completed.
Unlike the posters at a conference, however, existence of the Live Traffic paper was not publicized or put in a location in which it could be viewed by interested people.
According to Rader, SRI's posting of the Live Traffic paper on its FTP server was most similar to "placing posters at an unpublicized conference with no attendees".
Rader found that the Live Traffic paper was in a situation much more similar to the uncatalogued thesis in In re Bayer than the publicly disseminated posters in In re Klopfenstein.
Rader concluded that the pre-publication Live Traffic paper could not be considered catalogued or indexed in a meaningful way and was not intended to be disseminated to the public.
The Federal Circuit thus vacated and remanded the Delaware District Court's determination of invalidity based on the Live Traffic paper.
She concluded that whereas the thesis in In re Bayer had not been catalogued, the structure of SRI's FTP server made the Live Traffic paper publicly accessible.
According to Moore, the defendants had presented evidence that, given the host address for SRI's FTP server, one only needed to enter two directories to obtain the Live Traffic paper.
In discussing the pertinence of In re Klopfenstein, Moore analyzed each of that case's four requirements for patent invalidity due to public disseminations.
Porras emailed links to the paper to many people outside of SRI and failed to take protective measures such as non-disclosure agreements or even disclaimers.
SRI International is discussed at length in patent attorney Eric Guttag's treatise Applying the Printed Publication Bar in the Internet Age.