Patent Law Weblog
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Category: Patentable Subject Matter
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By Michael Borella — One of the more substantive questions in the recent interpretation of what encompasses patentable subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101 is whether facts should play any role in the analysis. The Supreme Court has not been perfectly clear on this issue, and the Federal Circuit appears to have taken both sides…
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PTAB Affirms Patent Eligibility of Claims for Training a Spoken Language Understanding Classifier By James Korenchan — In a decision issued earlier this month, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Patent Trial and Appeal Board reversed the final rejection of all twenty pending claims in U.S. Application No. 14/846,486, for which the real party in…
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By Donald Zuhn — Earlier this month, in Genetic Veterinary Sciences, Inc. v. LABOklin GmbH, Senior District Judge Henry Coke Morgan, Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia granted a motion for judgment as a matter of law under Rule 50 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure filed by…
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By Michael Borella — SAP America, Inc. (SAP) filed a declaratory judgment action in the Northern District of Texas, alleging that U.S. Patent No. 6,349,291 of InvestPic, LLC (InvestPic) was invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The District Court invalidated the '291 patent during the pleadings stage. InvestPic appealed the ruling to the Federal Circuit. Claim…
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By Michael Borella — The Patent Trial and Appeal Broad (PTAB) of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has often been criticized for being particularly harsh when reviewing appeals of claims rejected by an examiner of grounds of patent-ineligibly under 35 U.S.C. § 101. According to some sources, examiners are affirmed about 80-86% of the time…
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By James Korenchan — At the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Patent Policy Conference last month, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Andrei Iancu (at right) gave a keynote address on the role of U.S. patent policy in domestic innovation and the potential impacts on investment towards the advancement of science and technology. The primary…
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Purely Business Method Patent Found Ineligible under Section 101 By Joseph Herndon — In an appeal from a rejection in initial examination of appellant Mark Eberra's patent application, the Federal Circuit affirmed the Patent Trial and Appeal Board's ("Board") determination that the claims are patent-ineligible under § 101. The patent application is entitled "Business Method…
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By Donald Zuhn — In a letter sent to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Director Andrei Iancu earlier this month, the Intellectual Property Law Association of Chicago (IPLAC) presented its proposal for a revised version of 35 U.S.C. § 101. IPLAC described its proposal as a harmonized version of revisions to § 101 proposed by…
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By Michael Borella — The second part of the patent-eligibility test of Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Int'l involves an inquiry into whether certain elements of a claim directed to an unpatentable judicial exception are "well-understood, routine, and conventional." If this is the case, the claim fails to meet the requirements of 35 U.S.C. § 101. …
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Slot Machine Patent Invalidated As Being Directed to Ineligible Subject Matter By Joseph Herndon — Konami sued High 5 Games for patent infringement of U.S. Patent Nos. 8,096,869; 8,366,540; 8,662,810; and 8,616,955. The '869 patent, which is entitled "Gaming Machines with Runs of Consecutive Identical Symbols," issued on January 17, 2012, and is the parent…
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