DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Priority
Priority is acknowledged of certified copies of papers required by 37 CFR 1.55.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statements (IDS) were filed on 9/4/2024 and 1/31/2025. The submissions are in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statements are being considered by the examiner.
Specification
The lengthy specification has not been checked to the extent necessary to determine the presence of all possible minor errors. Applicant’s cooperation is requested in correcting any errors of which applicant may become aware in the specification.
Drawings
The drawings filed 5/20/2024 are accepted.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 3-5, 7-11, 14-15 and 17-20 objected to as being dependent upon a rejected base claim, but would be allowable if rewritten in independent form including all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims. In particular the concept of multiple combinations of playlist name, cover, and description was not taught by the cited art, nor could examiner make an additional rejection further in view of art that just provided a user with multiple selectable options, because the second set of objects (cover, name, description) made the combination non-obvious.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis (i.e., changing from AIA to pre-AIA ) for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claim(s) 1, 12, 13, 21, 24 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Casillas et al (US20190272286A1; filed 5/21/2019; hereinafter referred to as Casillas) in view of Ma (CN107193878B; published 9/22/2017).
With regards to claim 1, Casillas discloses A system comprising: an electronic device (Casillas, Fig. 1: user device 105) configured to:
detect a first operation of creating a first playlist of a user, wherein the first playlist comprises a first song (Casillas, abstract: “generating a playlist… a method includes initiating an online mode of the music service, where the device is connected to a music service server, and storing, in a cache memory of the device, at least one media object accessed by the user using the music service… automatically adding the at least one media object to a playlist stored in the cache memory;” The initiation of the online mode which results in the generation of the playlist is interpreted as the first operation of the user);
send, in response to detecting the first operation, first request information (Casillas, paragraph 20: “the music service server 115 can receive music data requests from the device 105 and can transmit or stream music data to the device 105 according to the requests.”) to request a first name of the first playlist and a first description of the first playlist (Casillas, paragraph 34: “while in the online mode, the device 204 may communicate with the server 206 in order to report information related to songs accessed using the device 204…” The device sends the server information of user information, and the server sends the playlists to the device – also see Fig. 2 for steps 218 and 220 regarding identifying and transmitting the music files of the playlists; paragraph 45: “the select playlist option 513 includes a graphical depiction representing the automatically-generated playlist and the title of the playlist;” the playlists received as a result of the sent information includes a playlist with a title and playlist information);
receive the first name and the first description; and display the first name and the first description (Casillas, paragraph 45: “the select playlist option 513 includes a graphical depiction representing the automatically-generated playlist and the title of the playlist”); and
a server coupled to the electronic device and configured to (Casillas, Fig. 2: Music server 206):
receive the first request information (Casillas, Fig. 2: Music Server 206 connected to device 204 in online mode 210; see rejection above regarding the request);
obtain, in response to the first request information, first playlist information of the first playlist (Casillas, paragraph 20: “the music service server 115 can receive music data requests from the device 105 and can transmit or stream music data to the device 105 according to the requests;” paragraph 19: “the music service server 115 and components thereof can provide music data or objects to the device 105;” ), …
obtain… the first name and the first description; and send, to the electronic device, the first name and the first description (Casillas, paragraph 19: “the music service server 115 can stream songs, tracks, playlist files including songs, and/or other music objects to the device 105 for access and consumption by the user 106;” the playlist files streamed to the user device are interpreted as including name and description information, because data such as the title, number of songs, and artwork are shown in Fig. 7: interface 600).
However Casillas does not disclose wherein the first playlist information comprises first lyric information of the first song or first audio information of the first song;
obtain, based on the first playlist information, the first name.
Ma teaches wherein the first playlist information comprises first lyric information of the first song or first audio information of the first song (Ma, abstract: “The embodiment of the present invention obtains the labels of the songs in the playlist”);
obtain, based on the first playlist information, the first name (Ma, abstract: “automatically generates the name of the playlist according to the preset rules”).
It would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date to have combined Casillas and Ma such that the name of the playlist is generated based on the song information of the song(s) within the playlist. This would have enabled the invention to name the playlist to reflect the characteristics of the songs of the playlists (Ma, abstract: “avoids the manual input of the name of the playlist by the mobile terminal user, and can also reflect the characteristics of at least a part of the songs in the playlist. It is convenient for mobile terminal users to preliminarily determine whether they want to listen to the songs in the playlist through the name of the playlist, which improves the user experience”).
Claim 12 recites substantially similar limitations to claim 1 and is thus rejected along the same rationale.
With regards to claim 13, which depends on claim 12, Casillas discloses obtaining, from the server, a cover of the first playlist, wherein the cover is based on the first playlist information; and displaying the cover (Casillas, Fig. 7: Cover artwork is displayed next to the playlist name, and is based on the songs in the playlist (the first song has an album cover matching the displayed playlist artwork)).
Claim 21 recites substantially similar limitations to claim 1 and is thus rejected along the same rationale.
Claim 24 recites substantially similar limitations to claim 13 and is thus rejected along the same rationale.
Claim(s) 16 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Casillas et al in view of Ma, and further in view of Spotify (“How to Upload a Custom Playlist Image Using Your Phone.” Spotify, 8 Dec. 2020, newsroom.spotify.com/2020-12-08/how-to-upload-a-custom-playlist-image-using-your-phone/.).
With regards to claim 16, which depends on claim 12, Casillas and Ma do not disclose wherein the first playlist information further comprises a cover from the user and that is of the first playlist.
However, Spotify teaches wherein the first playlist information further comprises a cover from the user and that is of the first playlist (Spotify, paragraph 2: “Spotify users everywhere will be able to upload custom covers and descriptions to their homemade playlists—using their phones”).
It would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date to have combined Casillas, Ma, and Spotify such that the user can upload their own playlist covers. This would have enabled a user to customize the playlist more (Spotify, paragraph 1: “Nothing says “I’m thinking of you” like a custom playlist. (It’s basically the new mixtape.) And after putting care, thought, and creativity into the tracks and podcasts on your homemade playlist, you may want to take an extra step to make it your own, perhaps with custom cover art, a name, and a description.”).
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
Abanami et al (US7500199B2): Teaches creating placeholder covers for playlists.
Pastor et al (US20190294690A1): Teaches making suggests to a user for characterizing a playlist.
Houseworth (US20170249059A1): Teaches suggesting field values to a user.
Doh et al (Doh, Seungheon, Junwon Lee, and Juhan Nam. "Music playlist title generation: A machine-translation approach." Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on NLP for Music and Spoken Audio (NLP4MusA). 2021.): Teaches automatically generating a playlist title based on the titles of the songs in the playlist using machine translation techniques.
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/B.C.A/Examiner, Art Unit 2178
/STEPHEN S HONG/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2178