Arendi S.A.R.L. v. Oath Holdings Inc., et al.: Another Victim of Electric Power Group
In Arendi v. Oath Holdings (nonprecedential), the Federal Circuit today struck down four patents using Electric Power Group (EPG). Interestingly, the district court had found three patents (the ‘356, ‘854, and ‘993 patents) invalid for reciting patent ineligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101 and one patent (the ‘843 patent) as satisfying § 101. The four patents all “concern identifying information in a document and using that information to search for related information in an external source, such as a contact database.”
At step one, the court described the claims of the ‘356, ‘854, and ‘993 patents as “‘analyzing’ textual information in a document, ‘identifying’ that information as a type that can be searched, ‘using’ that information to search a database or other information source, and ‘performing’ an action based on the retrieved information.” The court summarized these steps as “collecting information, analyzing the collected information, retrieving related information, and using the result.” Then, the court dropped the EPG bomb, “[w]e have long held that claims directed to ‘collecting information, analyzing it, and displaying certain results of the collection and analysis’ are abstract.” (citing EPG). The court also referred to the claims as reciting “functional results.”
Arendi argued that the “claims improve computer functionality by making it more convenient for users to retrieve information while working in a document.” But, the court relied on its oft-used phrase, “improving a user’s experience … without more” is insufficient to constitute an improvement to computer functionality. The court stated that the claims “use generic computer functionality as a tool to carry out an abstract information-processing task.” (citing EPG).
As to the ‘843 patent, the court stated that “it recites the same abstract process as the other … patents.” The district court had relied upon “beneficial coordination” between two computer programs as rendering the claims patent eligible. But the Federal Circuit disagreed: first, by stating that this feature was not recited in the claims and, second, by stating that even if the feature were implicitly recited, the claims do not describe a concrete improvement in how it operates.
At step two, the court found that the ‘356, ‘854, and ‘993 patent claims use “generic computer components performing conventional functions ….” And, the court held that Arendi’s “purported improvements-facilitating interaction between programs and reducing user steps-simply restate the abstract idea….” The court also stated that that same analysis applies to the ‘843 patent.
Key takeaways: Well, there’s not much to say here. If your claims can be summarized as collecting information, analyzing information, and displaying results and you want to escape the grasp of EPG, your specification and claims are going to have to describe, e.g., some technological problems that had to be overcome and solutions. The case I wrote about earlier today, Ollnova, is an example.