A new Federal Circuit decision found the claims of a patent directed to software license verification to be eligible for patenting under Section 101 of the Patent Act.

In Ancora Technologies, Inc. v. HTC America, Inc., the court reviewed the claims of U.S. patent 6,411,941, which involved methods of restricting software operation on a computer to be within a license for that computer. Representative claim 1 of the patent is:

A method of restricting software operation within a license for use with a computerincluding an erasable, non-volatile memory area of a BIOS of the computer, anda volatile memory area; the method comprising the steps of:

selecting a program residing in the volatile memory,

using an agent to set up a verification structure in the erasable, non-volatile memoryof the BIOS, the verification structure accommodating data that includes atleast one license record,

verifying the program using at least the verification structure from the erasable non-volatile memory of the BIOS, and

acting on the program according to the verification.

Thus, the method required storage of a license record in a “verification structure” created in a portion of the computer’s BIOS memory.

In its decision, the court noted that as in its Enfish, Visual Memory, Finjan, Core Wireless and Data Technologies cases, “[i]mproving security — here, against acomputer’s unauthorized use of a program — can be a non-abstract computer-functionality improvement if done by a specific technique that departs from earlier approaches to solve a specific computer problem.” The court also found that because in the representative claim “a license record is stored in a particular, modifiable, non-volatile portion of the computer’s BIOS … the claim addresses a technological problem with computers:  vulnerability of license-authorization software to hacking.”

Quoting its SAP America, Inc. v. InvestPic, LLC decision, the court also noted that the claim has “the specificity required to transform a claim from one claiming only a result to one claiming away of achieving it.” Therefore the court stated that it did not need to consider step two of the Alice analysis.

[1] ____ USPQ2d____ (Fed. Cir. Nov. 16, 2018).

[2] 127 USPQ2d 1597 (Fed. Cir. 2018).

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