Is Electric Power Group (EPG) the Federal Circuit’s new patentable-subject-matter weapon of choice? It might be.

Over a one-week period, the Federal Circuit used EPG three times to strike down patents: Aviation Capital Partners (5/6/25 – taxable status of a vehicular asset), Geoscope Tech (5/2/25 – determining the location of mobile devices), and Longitude licensing (4/30/25 – performing digital image correction on a computer). Although non-precedential, these cases illustrate the wide range of technologies that EPG can be used to strike down. Since EPG was decided in 2016, the Federal Circuit has used EPG to kill patents involving lots of different technologies, such as oil services technology (TDE Petroleum), audio/visual data streaming (Two-way Media), visualization of medical scans (AI Visualize), and call waiting and caller ID service (Reese). As I’ve written and spoken extensively about, if you are defending a patent or application where the claims could be considered as involving data collection, analysis, and display (or anything close), tread carefully. Focus on the key arguments that I’ve mentioned before, namely, (1) the invention improves the functioning of the computer itself, (2) the invention improves another technology or technical field, (3) the invention improves over the prior art in a technical manner, and (4) the invention addresses a technical solution to a technical problem.