Patent Law Weblog
Category: Patentable Subject Matter
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By Michael Borella — CosmoKey asserted U.S. Patent No. 9,246,903 against Duo in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, alleging infringement. The District Court found the patent's claims to be ineligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101 because they were directed to an abstract idea and lacked an inventive concept. On review, the…
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By Michael Borella — Two years ago, MyMail and ooVoo went to the mat in the Federal Circuit over claims that the District Court for the Northern District of California found ineligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101. Patent holder MyMail was able to convince two out of three judges on the Federal Circuit panel that the…
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By Michael Borella and Ashley Hatzenbihler[1]— Introduction Diamond v. Diehr, decided by the Supreme Court in 1981, seemed to establish a bedrock principle of statutory construction for patent law. The Court stated that "[t]he 'novelty' of any element or steps in a process, or even of the process itself, is of no relevance in determining…
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Electronic Gaming Patents Found Invalid under § 101 By Joseph Herndon — In the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas (Houston Division), Plaintiff Epic Tech, LLC (a seller of so-called "sweepstakes games") sued Defendants Fusion Skill, Inc. and Texas Wiz, LLC for infringement of U.S. Patent Nos. 9,589,423 and 8,545,315 with the…
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By Michael Borella — Sensormatic asserted U.S. Patents 7,730,534, 7,936,370, 7,954,129, 8,208,019, and 8,610,772 against Wyze in the District of Delaware, alleging infringement. Wyze moved the District Court to dismiss under Rule 12(c), on the grounds that the claims are directed to ineligible subject matter. The motion was granted. Sensormatic appealed. In Alice v. CLS Bank,…
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By Michael Borella — When the Supreme Court began poking around into the law of patent eligibility just over a decade ago, the invention topics that it considered under the abstract idea exception were limited to types of financial transactions. The invention of Bilski v. Kappos was directed to hedging and that of Alice v.…
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By Kevin E. Noonan and Michael Borella — Today, the Supreme Court requested the views of the Solicitor General in its consideration of American Axle's certiorari petition, which asks the Court to reverse the Federal Circuit's decision in American Axle & Mfg. v. Neapco Holdings LLC. That decision is noteworthy on several grounds. It is…
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By Michael Borella — The Supreme Court's Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Int'l case has been criticized for setting forth a patent eligibility analysis that is unworkably subjective. As a consequence, the validity of particular types of inventions, especially those in the software and business method space, can be uncertain until undergoing judicial review. In…
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By Kevin E. Noonan — Exactly two weeks after affirming a decision by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) rejecting claims for failure to satisfy the subject matter eligibility standard under 35 U.S.C. § 101, in ex parte examination of claims to methods and related computing systems for genetic…
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By Donald Zuhn — On Monday, Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Tom Cotton (R-AR) sent a letter to Drew Hirshfeld, the Commissioner for Patents at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, to propose that the USPTO conduct a pilot program on a sequenced approach to patent examination. In their letter, Sen. Tillis (at right), the…
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