The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2014 Alice decision narrowed the scope of patent eligible subject matter and introduced unpredictable legal and economic consequences—including more rejections of claims by patent examiners under 35 U.S.C. § 101 as ineligible subject matter, and uncertainty as to whether claims would be rejected on such grounds. In a recent report entitled … Continue Reading
In Mayo Collaborative Servs. v. Prometheus Labs., Inc., 566 U.S. 66, 71 (2012), and Alice Corp. Pty. Ltd. v. CLS Bank Int’l, 134 S. Ct. 2347 (2014), the Supreme Court of the United States established a two part test for determining patent subject matter eligibility. While most practitioners tend to focus on the second part … Continue Reading
On February 14, 2018, a Federal Circuit panel in Aatrix Software, Inc. v. Green Shades Software, Inc., No. 2017-1452, overturned a Middle District of Florida decision that held patent claims to systems and methods for importing data into viewable form on a computer to be patent-ineligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101. According to the majority opinion … Continue Reading
Challenges to patent eligibility under 35 U.S.C. § 101 have become so routine in patent litigation that it is easy to overlook the opinions that seem to issue almost daily from the district courts and, less frequently, from the Federal Circuit. If one were to judge solely by the tenor of recent cert petitions filed with … Continue Reading
In Part One of this post, I summarized the Federal Circuit’s recent ruling on patent eligibility in Visual Memory LLC v NVIDIA Corp. In this second part I look at Judge Hughes’ dissent and the majority’s response to Hughes. Dissent Judge Hughes believed the claims could not be described at a lower level of abstraction … Continue Reading
In a rare reversal of a district court’s patent-ineligibility holding, the Federal Circuit found the claims at issue in Visual Memory LLC v NVIDIA Corp. patent-eligible under Step 1 of the Supreme Court’s two-part eligibility test in Alice v. CLS Bank. The Federal Circuit found that the claims (directed to computer memory) were, for purposes … Continue Reading
In June 2014 the Supreme Court introduced the two-step Alice/Mayo test for patent eligibility, intended to exclude from patenting claims directed to ineligible abstract ideas under 35 USC 101. Since that time, the Federal Circuit has issued numerous precedential opinions applying this test to software claims. This body of law, however, has yet to provide … Continue Reading
