Podcast: Patentable Subject Matter in 2019
Drafting Software Patents In A Post-Alice World
Polsinelli Podcasts - Hear How the SCOTUS Ruling May Impact Patent-Eligible Subject Matter for Software
On July 17, 2024, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published guidance regarding the patent subject matter eligibility of claims concerning technology applicable to artificial intelligence (AI)....more
In a July 16 press release, The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced that it issued a guidance update on “patent subject matter eligibility to address innovation in critical emerging technologies including...more
Senior Circuit Judge Bryson of the Federal Circuit, sitting by designation in the District of Delaware, recently granted-in-part and denied-in-part a Rule 12(c) motion for judgment based on patent eligibility under 35 U.S.C....more
On August 2, 2022, Sen. T. Tillis introduced the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (S.4734) in an effort to clarify which inventions are actually patentable and to codify those that are not. Since the Supreme Court handed...more
The law of unintended consequences provides that actions “always have effects that are unanticipated or unintended.” This folk wisdom holds true when it comes to the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act of 2022....more
In the case USADATA Inc. v. DataWidget LLC, No. CV-21-00526-PHX-DLR, 2021 WL 5084283 (D. Ariz. Nov. 1, 2021), the patent at issue is titled, "System and Method for Selling Customer-Specific Data Subsets on a Third-Party...more
In most jurisdictions around the world, the most common form of protection for software is copyright. In the US, ever since the Alice decision, copyright was thought to be the best form of protection for software. Given...more
A recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit highlights the importance of describing any improvements to technology in the specification. In the case of Whitserve LLC v. Dropbox, Inc., WhitServe...more
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,...more
Stanford University applied for a U.S. patent for statistical methods of predicting haplotype phase. In 2019, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board rejected the application as ineligible subject matter. Last week, a panel of the...more
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit looked at a patent directed to a data privacy system that described users operating mobile device apps to "socialize, bank, shop, and navigate." As users operate such apps,...more
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit recently issued the decision of Simio, LLC. V. FlexSim Software Products, Inc. (Dec. 29, 2020). In upholding the District Court’s decision that the software claims at issue...more
This decision is bad. Not an American Axle level of bad, but still quite far from good. Simio sued FlexSim in the District of Utah for alleged infringement of its U.S. Patent No. 8,156,468. FlexSim moved for dismissal on...more
The evolution of graphical user interfaces parallels the evolution of computing technology itself. As computers grow more powerful and sophisticated, so does their ability to display cutting-edge representations of...more
Software patents have garnered a lot of attention in recent years due, at least in part, to the proliferation of software-enabled devices, such as smartphones and tablets, and the use of software to control a range of devices...more
Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Alice v. CLS Bank, patent stakeholders have faced many difficulties navigating the world of patent-eligibility. Through many Federal Circuit decisions and Guidance given by the U.S....more
Claims for an Interactive 3D Virtual Environment Found Patent Ineligible - In the field of computer gaming, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California recently granted Defendants' Rule 12 motion...more
Late last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit delivered ShoppersChoice.com the affirmation it ordered in Electronic Communication Technologies, LLC (ECT) v. ShoppersChoice.com, LLC. In doing so, the court...more
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found that patent claims directed to a communication system were patent eligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101 because the claimed invention changes the normal operation of a...more
By reversing the lower court’s ruling that the asserted claims were not patent-eligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101 in Uniloc v. LG Electronics, the Federal Circuit resurrected Uniloc’s infringement suit against LG Electronics. It...more
In deciding patent eligibility of computer-implemented claims, courts consider whether the claims merely implement a generic computer or whether they improve the functioning of the computer itself. The Federal Circuit...more
Since I last wrote on the Coons-Tillis patent eligibility reform in Congress, the Federal Circuit declined to take up an en banc rehearing of Athena v. Mayo. The court was deeply divided in the 7-5 decision, with all 12...more
Earlier this week, the Federal Circuit reviewed a PTAB affirming the examiner’s rejection of claims directed to a computer-conducted method of "assigning and managing the rights to receive taxes when amounts are disbursed...more
Main Quest: Does Your Gaming Stream Violate the Copyright Act? Streaming platforms, such as Twitch, Mixer and YouTube Gaming, are quickly becoming household names, with daily viewership rates that rival those of more...more
In The Chamberlain Group, Inc. v. Techtronic Industries Co., the Federal Circuit weighed in on the type of subject matter that can be characterized as an “abstract idea” and, thus, not eligible for patent protection....more