Before Lourie, Bryson, and Stark. Appeal from the United States District Court for the Central District of California.

Summary: Patent claims that merely recite result-orientated, functional language without specifying the steps of information manipulation are invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101.

Mobile Acuity sued Blippar for infringement of two patents directed to systems and methods for associating user-uploaded images and information with real world locations. Blippar filed a motion to dismiss, arguing that certain claims were representative of patents’ claims and that all of the patents’ claims were invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The district court granted Blippar’s motion to dismiss, finding the challenged claims to be representative of all of the patents’ claims and directed to nonpatentable subject matter.

On appeal, the Federal Circuit affirmed the district court. First, the Federal Circuit held that the district court correctly treated certain claims as representative of all claims of the asserted patents. The Federal Circuit found that Blippar had shown that all claims of the asserted patents were “substantially similar and linked to the same ineligible concept” and that Mobile Acuity had failed to identify any limitations in any of its claims that were materially different from the claims the district court treated as representative.

Second, the Federal Circuit found that the asserted claims were directed to the abstract idea of “receiving information, associating information with images, comparing the images, and presenting information based on that comparison.” Under step one of the two-step Alice/Mayo test, the Federal Circuit determined that the asserted claims consisted solely of result-orientated, functional language and omitted any specific requirements as to how the steps of the claim were to be performed. Specifically, the Federal Circuit found that claim language requiring one image “corresponding” to another image failed to claim a specific method for comparing the images. Under step two of the Alice/Mayo test, the Federal Circuit concluded that Mobile Acuity’s purported inventive concept was part of the abstract idea itself.

MOBILE ACUITY LTD. v. BLIPPAR LTD.

Editor: Sean Murray