Tagged: Patent Prosecution

District courts have been abuzz with accused infringers asserting invalidity based on ineligible subject matter under section 101. This is a result of evolving jurisprudence developed by the Federal Circuit and Supreme Court over the last few years. Today, that continued with the Supreme Court unanimously holding in Alice Corp. Pty v. CLS Bank Int’l, 573 U.S. ___ (2014) that, for claims drawn to an abstract idea, “merely requiring generic computer implementation fails to transform that abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention.”

The United Supreme Court has been a “hot bench” for patent cases. On the same day, it issued two unanimous decisions reversing the Federal Circuit relating to claim definiteness and inducement infringement, the former of which we previously discussed. In the latter, Limelight Networks v. Akamai Tech. No. 12-786, 572 U.S. ___ (2014), the U.S. Supreme Court held that a party cannot be liable for inducing infringement under 35 U.S.C. §271(b) unless there is direct infringement in 35 U.S.C. §271(a). The Court in dicta also suggested that the Federal Circuit may wish to reconsider its prior decision, Muniauction, Inc. v. Thomson Corp., 532 F.3d 1318 (2008), which held that a party–who does not perform all the method steps–cannot be liable for direct infringement in §271(a) unless it controls or directs another party to complete the other steps.

Section 101 challenges continue to be front and center at the district court level, including three recent decisions in the United States District Courts for the Northern District of California and Eastern District of Virginia which reflect holdings falling on opposite sides of 101 patentability. In France Telecom S.A. v. Marvell Semiconductor Inc., the court denied defendant’s summary judgment motion because it failed to meet the “high level of proof” needed to succeed on an eligibility challenge under section 101. There, the patent involved correcting errors in telecommunication and other signals (caused by noise or interference which distorts the data) known as turbo coding. After summarizing relevant jurisprudence, the court identified the abstract ideas relevant to the subject matter of the patent claims at issue as “error-correction coding” or “decoding digital data elements.” The court then analyzed whether the claims contained “additional substantive limitations that narrow, confine, or otherwise tie [them] down.” Specifically, the court found that they provide “unique and detailed [error-detection coding or decoding] methods . . . or inventive concepts that exceed the prior art, namely, coding in parallel and a novel method of iterative coding.” Thus, the claimed inventions “provide the necessary substantive claim limitations beyond the mere recitation” of abstract ideas. The court also gave the claims a passing grade in the machine-or-transformation test: “[c]laim 1 takes digital data elements and turns them into a distinct series of coded data elements, which Claim 10 in turn decodes.” The court further found relevant (similar to the court in TQP Development we previously discussed) that the purpose of the patent was “to disclose a method for more accurate and efficient data transmission.”

On the heels of CLS Bank Int’l v. Alice Corp. Pty presently before the Supreme Court, the Federal Circuit and district courts in 2014 have continued to issue decisions analyzing computer-implemented inventions under 35 U.S.C. § 101. These courts have generally sought to answer similar questions: whether the claim is an abstract idea; whether this abstract idea preempts all other uses or can be performed in the human mind (or on a pen and paper); and whether the claim contains other limitations to narrow it sufficiently, such as being tied to a specific machine or transforming the data into a different thing.