Electric Power Group (EPG) strikes again! 

The Fed. Cir. today struck down claims directed to providing product location information within a store for failing to recite patentable subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101 in Innovaport v. Target (nonprecedential). This was a nice, meaty decision (unlike the one I posted about earlier today). Perhaps this is because the claims not only ran afoul of EPG, but they also ran head on into the Fed. Cir’s effective ban on business method patents. Yes, that’s what I called it because the Fed. Cir. has not found one business method patent eligible post Alice.

The representative claim is directed to (1) collecting product information; (2) analyzing it; (3) receiving a product-location inquiry; (4) retrieving product-location information; and (5) presenting the product’s location and other information. The court readily dismissed the claim’s mention of technology, like user interface, database, devices, etc., finding that it was ensnared by EPG (collecting information, analyzing information, and displaying results is an abstract idea). Additionally, each of the steps could be performed by a human. So, the claims really never had a chance.

The patent owner argued that the claims recited the technical advantage of the customer receiving product information in real time and information about related products. But “improving a user’s experience while using a computer application is not, without more, sufficient to render the claims directed to an improvement in computer functionality.” Interestingly, the patent owner mentioned that the claims overcame a § 101 rejection during prosecution, to which the court responded, “courts are not required to defer to Patent Office determinations as to eligibility.” (I’ve been mentioning for a long time that there is a wide chasm between what the Fed. Cir. and the USPTO think is patent eligible. I’ve got a webinar coming up devoted to that topic. Stay tuned.)

At step two, the court rejected the technological recitations as mere recitation of generic computer components. The court also stated that “‘[l]inking two products in a cross-referential manner and providing a recommendation about another product are not inventive concepts because they are merely the abstract ideas.”