News / Insights

If you follow my posts, you’ve seen a lot of functional claims struck down recently by the Federal Circuit. Today’s TJTM Tech. v. Google (nonprecedential) is yet another example. The technology involves suppressing incoming notifications from “calls, texts, emails, etc.” on a mobile phone to prevent distracted driving and automatically notifying the sender with an…

In today’s RFC Lenders of Texas v. Smart Chemical Solutions case (nonprecedential), the Federal Circuit needed very little analysis to affirm a district court’s grant of a motion to dismiss, finding the claims ineligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The technology involves monitoring vehicles for unauthorized usage. The claims were functionally drafted (e.g., “detecting movement…

Here’s my analysis of yesterday’s Constellation Designs Federal Circuit case dealing with patentable subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101. This case is a good example of how differently the court treats result-oriented claims versus detailed claims.

In today’s Nantworks v. Niantic case (nonprecedential), the Federal Circuit killed two patents directed to data analysis/manipulation by using its normal SAE process. The case involved two patents: the ‘518 (mapping augmented-reality (AR) objects and rendering them on a display) and the ‘051 (incorporating visual objects into a digital representation of an environment surrounding an…

In yesterday’s In re McFadden Fed. Cir. case (nonprecedential), the court struck down an application directed to “generating one distribution of information items, then comparing it to a previous distribution of information items, to determine how information should be presented to a consumer.” If Mr. McFadden’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he had another one…

In step one of the Alice patentable-subject-matter test under 35 U.S.C. § 101, the Fed. Cir. normally reviews the claim and specification and then looks at its case law to see if the claim recites subject matter on the forbidden list of abstract ideas (see my prior posts) to determine if the claim is directed…

In the Supreme Court’s Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International decision, the Court left the contours of what exactly constitutes an “abstract idea” undefined, leaving lower courts and patent practitioners to struggle. Recently, the Federal Circuit has provided both clarity and confusion to the abstract-idea analysis. On the clarity side, in GoTV Streaming v. Netflix, the…

The Fed. Cir. today remanded a patentable subject matter case under 35 U.S.C. § 101 to the district court for an Alice step-two analysis in Trustees of Columbia Univ. v. Gen Digital. I’ve been writing about how there is a split at the Fed. Cir. on whether conventionality is used at step one. Well, in…

The next installment of my continuing webinar series on patentable subject matter (since 2014) is on March 17. This webinar will focus on the wide chasm between the Federal Circuit’s view and the USPTO’s view of the patent eligibility of AI and Business methods. Patent counsel should be aware of whether the patents the USPTO…

The Fed. Cir. today struck down file-comparison claims for failing to recite patent eligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101 in Oasis Tooling v. Siemens Industry Software (nonprecedential). Apparently, at the time of the invention, “conventional tools for designing semiconductor chips had a recurring problem: they were unable to recognize when cells were functionally…