Is conventionality considered at Alice’s step one or not?

The Fed. Cir. just created a lot of confusion in my mind when it struck down today another AI patent for failing to recite patent eligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101 in Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst. v. Amazon (nonprecedential). Obviously, this is another blow to the patent eligibility of AI after Recentive, and I’ll…

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Does the Alice/Mayo test apply to natural phenomenon?

The Fed. Cir. just issued a very interesting biotech patentable subject matter case under 35 U.S.C. § 101: REGENXBIO v. Sarepta Therapeutics. The reason why I find it interesting is because the court addressed whether the Alice/Mayo test applies to a natural phenomenon. The case involves host cells that include a recombinant nucleic acid molecule…

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The Federal Circuit’s list of abstract ideas

As promised yesterday, here’s a pretty exhaustive list of abstract ideas found by the Fed. Cir. post Alice (and a few interesting legal points on step one). I don’t list duplicates. For example, I don’t list all of the variations of abstract ideas that fall under Electric Power Group. Perhaps I’ll save that for another…

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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within a store for failing to recite patentable subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101 in Innovaport v. Target (nonprecedential).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…

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Q Technologies v. Walmart (Fed. Cir.) (nonprecedential)

The Fed. Cir. yesterday issued a conclusory, patentable-subject-matter opinion under 35 U.S.C. § 101: Q Technologies v. Walmart (nonprecedential). The court basically just agreed with the district court in finding the claims patent ineligible with little, if any, explanation/analysis. The lesson to be learned here is that if a contested claim can be characterized as…

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The Fed. Cir. issues another 35 U.S.C. § 101 case, ending the several-months-long drought

Finally, after several months, the Fed. Cir. today issued another patentable subject matter case under 35 U.S.C. § 101: Technology in Ariscale v. Razer (nonprecedential). The district court below found patent ineligible claims directed to “‘[a] computer-implemented method for decoding a transmission signal’ that comprises steps including ‘receiving,’ ‘deinterleaving,’ ‘combining,’ and ‘decoding’ the information in…

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