On September 17, 2024, Judges Taranto, Chen and Cunningham of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (“CAFC”) upheld the invalidation of a patent belonging to Angel Technologies Group, LLC and dismissed other infringement claims brought against Meta Platforms, Inc. as moot, after other patents at issue were found unpatentable in inter partes review by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“PTAB”). Angel Techs. Grp. LLC v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 2022-2100 (C.A.F.C. 2024).
Plaintiff initially sued defendant in the Central District of California, alleging infringement of U.S. Patent Nos. 9,959,291; 8,954,432; 10,417,275; and 10,628,480. This patent family relates to “digitally tagging images,” including “permitting users to identify ‘objects’ (for example, persons) and the location of the objects in images, then storing that information for later use.”
Defendant filed a motion to dismiss, asserting that the claims of the asserted patents are ineligible for patent protection under 35 U.S.C. § 101 because they are directed to an abstract idea (identifying objects in photos and retaining the information) and “add nothing inventive” under Alice Corp. Pty. Ltd. v. CLS Bank Int’l, 573 U.S. 208 (2014). The district court granted the motion, and plaintiff appealed.
While the appeal was pending, the PTAB found all but one of the asserted patents’ claims unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. § 103, leaving only claim 15 of the ’291 patent at issue. Therefore, the CAFC dismissed plaintiff’s appeal from the district court litigation as moot with regard to all other patents, finding no case or controversy under Article III after plaintiff’s time to appeal the PTAB’s decision expired.
Claim 15 of the ’291 patent directly depends from claim 5 and indirectly depends from claim 1. The CAFC began its § 101 analysis by analyzing claim 1 under Alice/Mayo step 1. Claim 1 “is directed to well-known activities that humans have long performed in identifying people in photos.” The “claim essentially recites [eight] steps for tagging a user in a photo.” Claim 15 describes “collecting photos in a photo album,” which the CAFC ruled “a patent-ineligible idea.” The CAFC further specified that “sending information in response to an input . . . does not make the idea less abstract.”
Turning to Alice/Mayo step 2, the CAFC found that claim 15 does not contain elements that serve to transform an abstract idea into a patent-eligible one: “Claim 15 of the ’291 patent refers to nothing more than well-understood, routine, and conventional technology components and does not add significantly more to the abstract idea it recites.” The CAFC noted that this was particularly evidenced by the fact that the specification indicates that the “invention” can be implemented using any generic computational device.
The CAFC further stated that the instances of industry praise cited by plaintiff merely “praise the benefits of tagging photos, which is the abstract idea itself, not any specific technological improvement that [plaintiff] made.”
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