Maier & Maier Obtains Grant of Summary Judgment of Invalidity Based on §101 Related to Wearable Technology

Maier & Maier

April 5, 2024 – Maier & Maier PLLC is pleased to report that we secured a victory for our client Firstbeat Technologies OY in a case involving a heart rate measuring apparatus incorporated into wearable technology. The case was originally filed by Polar Electro OY in the District of Delaware on November 7, 2011, but was eventually transferred to the District of Utah. In December of 2021, we argued our Motions for Summary Judgment (“MSJ”) before Judge Waddoups. Today, the Court issued a decision granting our MSJ that the claims of U.S. Patent No. 6,537,227 are invalid as abstract. See 1:17-cv-00139-CW, Dkt. 498. The case has now been dismissed and Judgment has been entered in favor of our client Firstbeat Technologies OY.

Maier & Maier continues to enjoy consistent and favorable results in its litigation matters. The firm has obtained favorable results when defending clients accused of infringement by competitors as well as cases brought by patent assertion entities. This victory comes on the heels of another favorable decision in an ITC 337 Investigation last month.

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Federal Circuit Partially Overturns Invalidation of 4 Software Patents Under §101

Maier & Maier

Inventor Sholem Weisner sued Google LLC for patent infringement of four patents (10,380,202, 10,642,910, 10,394,905 and 10,642,911) in the District Court for the Southern District of New York in 2020. Weisner’s patents all shared the same specification which generally described ways to “digitally record a person’s physical activities and ways to use this digital record.” Google enjoyed an early win when the District Court granted summary judgment finding all claims ineligible under §101. However, on October 13, 2022, the Federal Circuit partially reversed the District Court, specifically finding that the ‘905 and ‘911 patent claims should not have been dismissed for patent ineligibility at this stage. Weisner v. Google LLC, 2021-2228  (Fed. Cir. 2022).

The Federal Circuit found that the District Court correctly dismissed the ‘202 and ‘910 patents for patent ineligibility. The claims in question were directed to the abstract idea of “collecting information on a user’s movements and location history and electronically recording that data.” Specifically, these claims were essentially about “creating a digital travel log”. Weisner argued that the system was an improvement on a computer because it automatically made these recordings and limited “what is recorded to only specific types of interactions that are pre-approved and agreed to by an individual member and a vendor member”. Neither the District Court nor the Federal Circuit found this line of argumentation compelling, noting that “humans have consistently kept records of a person’s location and travel in the form of travel logs, diaries, journals…” purely automating or digitizing a travel log is not sufficient to “bring the claims out of the realm of abstractness.”

With regard to the remaining ‘905 and ‘911 patents the Federal Circuit said, “at step one [of Alice] the district court erred by failing to separately analyze these patents.” While the district court analyzed the remaining patents on the same grounds as the ‘202 and ‘910 the Federal Circuit found that these patents were instead directed to “creating and using travel histories to improve computerized search results” (emphasis added). Specifically, the ‘905 and ‘911 patents recited “a method of enhancing digital search results for a business in a target geographic area using URLs of location histories.” The Federal Circuit still found this was an abstract idea, but much closer than the first two patents.

On Alice step 2 the Federal Circuit found that the ‘905 and ‘911 patents “recite a specific implementation of the abstract idea that purports to solve a problem unique to the internet and that, accordingly, these claims should not have been held ineligible under step two at this stage.” This finding was not based on any new structure or algorithm, in fact Weisner conceded “the patented system uses the same or similar algorithm used by existing search engines.” However, this alone did not “doom the claims”. The allowability was instead found based on “the claims specificity as to the mechanism through which they achieve improved search results”, which was done “through a ‘location relationship’ with a ‘reference individual’ for the ‘905 patent or through the ‘location history of the individual member’ … for the ‘911 patent.” Therefore, the claims recite “a new technique for prioritizing the results of the conventional search,” which in the context of the internet are sufficient to “add significantly more to the abstract idea of using travel histories to improve computerized search results.”

This case, like the Federal Circuits other recent §101 case Cooperative Entertainment v. Kollective Technology, shows that the Federal Circuit is willing to push back on District Court §101 invalidations, especially for software cases where such invalidations are common. Whether this is indicative of a larger trend on how the Federal Circuit views §101 going forward still remains to be seen.

Federal Circuit Extends §101 to Cover Graphical User Interfaces in Core Wireless v. LG

Maier & Maier

In Core Wireless Licensing S.A.R.L. v. LG Electronics, Inc., 2016-2684, 2017-1922 (Fed. Cir. Jan. 23, 2018), a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Moore, O’Malley, Wallach) upheld patent claims directed to a graphical user interface under 35 U.S.C. §101, concluding that the claims were not directed to a patent-ineligible abstract idea.

Core Wireless brought an action against LG in the Eastern District of Texas alleging infringement of U.S. Patent Nos. 8,713,476 and 8,434,020, having claims dealing with an application summary screen that is displayed while the one or more applications summarized are in an un-launched state. The District Court denied summary judgment based on 35 U.S.C. §101, and LG appealed.

The Federal Circuit began its analysis by determining that the claims of the two patents in question were directed to an “improved user interface,” a non-abstract idea, rather than the abstract idea of an index. Specifically, these claims were “directed to a particular manner of summarizing and presenting information in electronic devices.” For example, claim 1 required “an application summary that can be reached directly from the menu” and further limiting the application summary (such as having the application summary list a limited set of data with each of the data in the list being selectable to launch the respective application and enable the selected data to be seen within the respective application) as well as a particular manner of accessing the summary window and certain other limitations.

The Court analogized the case to other cases in which a computer-implemented claim was found eligible, such as Enfish, LLC v. Microsoft Corp., Thales Visionix Inc. v. U.S., Visual Memory LLC v. NVIDIA Corp., and Finjan, Inc. v. Blue Coat Systems, Inc., specifically noting that the claims in each of these cases were found to improve a computer or technological system, and were thus not abstract. (Just like in many of these cases, the Court looked to the patent specifications in order to determine what aspects of a computer the claims were directed toward improving.)

Once the §101 matter was resolved, the Court also heard the issue of non-infringement. This turned, in large part, on the Court’s interpretation of the phrase “unlaunched state” in the claims, which LG had (unsuccessfully) argued in the District Court should refer to a situation in which the applications were “not running” rather than “not displayed.” LG argued that it would not infringe if the applications were required to be “not running.” The court (minus Judge Wallach, who dissented on this point) sided with the District Court, finding that the District Court correctly construed “unlaunched state” as “not displayed.”

Importantly, the claims in this case were considered to be an improvement to computer technology because they improved the ability of a user to use the computer. In order to use prior art systems, users had to “drill down through many layers to get to desired data or functionality [which] could seem slow, complex and difficult to learn, particularly to novice users,” while the claimed invention, by contrast, was much more user-friendly. This effectively adds “user-friendliness” or “usability” to the list of innovations which can be an improvement to computer technology, significantly expanding the list of patent-eligible subject matter.

It has also historically been a little unclear as to how graphical user interface designs can be protected by intellectual property rights. There is a circuit split between the Ninth Circuit and other circuits as to whether GUIs are copyrightable subject matter, and past Federal Circuit jurisprudence as to their patentability has come down on both sides of the line. However, the vast majority of cases (such as, for example, Intellectual Ventures I LLC v. Erie Indemnity Co., Intellectual Ventures I LLC v. Capital One Bank (USA), and Internet Patents Corp. v. Active Network, Inc.) have found GUIs to be ineligible, while the one case that upheld a GUI patent claim (Trading Technologies Int’l v. CQG Inc) was a non-precedential opinion that dealt with an extremely detailed claim. This case provides applicants with a clear model to follow for future applications on interface technology or any similar technology.

Clarifying 35 U.S.C. § 101 in McRO, Inc. v. Bandai Namco Games America

Timothy Maier

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in McRO, Inc. v. Bandai Namco Games America, reversed the district court’s judgment on the pleadings that the asserted claims of U.S. Patent Nos. 6,307,576 (the ‘576 patent) and 6,611,278 (the ‘278 patent) were directed to patent-ineligible subject matter and therefore invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The much-anticipated decision, issued on September 13, 2016, provides greater insight into identifying patent-eligible subject matter for computer-based inventions. In particular, the court highlights the significance of claim construction and preemption in conducting a patentability analysis.

BACKGROUND

The patents-in-suit, both issued to Maury Rosenfeld, relate to a method of automatically animating lip synchronization and facial expression of animated characters. The method uses a set of rules to define values for transitioning between facial expressions as a function of sequences of sounds in the speech of animated characters. According to the patentee, the prior art encompassed a “keyframe” approach, where a human animator would manually set the appropriate “morph weights” at certain important times in the transcript instead of at every frame. The claimed invention essentially “automate[s] a 3-D animator’s task, specifically, determining when to set keyframes and setting those keyframes through rules that are applied to the timed transcript to determine the morph weight outputs.”

In 2012 and 2013, patentee McRO, Inc. filed lawsuits against various video game developers and publishers (collectively, Bandai) for alleged infringement of the ‘576 and ‘278 patents. The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California granted the defendants’ motion on the pleadings that the asserted claims were directed to patent ineligible subject matter under § 101, thereby holding the patents invalid. Although admitting the claims facially did not appear to be directed to an abstract idea, the district court nonetheless found the claims too broadly preemptive to satisfy §101. The district court reasoned that because the claims were not limited to specific rules, but rather “purport to cover all such rules,” the claims merely call for the application of the abstract idea of using rules. Ultimately, the district court found that “while the patents do not preempt the field of automatic lip synchronization for computer-generated 3D animation, they do preempt the field of such lip synchronization using a rules-based morph target approach.” The district court concluded that the claims were ineligible for patent protection because the “novel portion of [the] invention are claimed too broadly.”

McRO subsequently appealed, arguing that its patents were not directed to an abstract idea and further that the specific claimed rules did not preempt the field of using rules in speech animation. Bandai, on the other hand, maintained that the McRO patents merely amounted to an automation of a preexisting process on a general-purpose computer.

Claim 1 of the ’576 patent was deemed representative and dispositive of the asserted claims for the purposes of appeal:

A method for automatically animating lip synchronization and facial expression of three-dimensional characters comprising:

obtaining a first set of rules that define output morph weight set stream as a function of phoneme sequence and time of said phoneme sequence;

obtaining a timed data file of phonemes having a plurality of sub-sequences;

generating an intermediate stream of output morph weight sets and a plurality of transition parameters between two adjacent morph weight sets by evaluating said plurality of sub-sequences against said first set of rules;

generating a final stream of output morph weight sets at a desired frame rate from said intermediate stream of output morph weight sets and said plurality of transition parameters; and

applying said final stream of output morph weight sets to a sequence of animated characters to produce lip synchronization and facial expression control of said animated characters.

DISCUSSION

In reversing the district court’s ruling, the Federal Circuit cautioned against an oversimplification of the claims. The court noted that under the Alice test, “a court must look to the claims as an ordered combination, without ignoring the requirements of the individual steps” in determining the patentability of a method.  Here, the court determined that the claims are limited to rules with particular characteristics. Specifically, “the claims themselves set out meaningful requirements for the first set of rules: they ‘define[] a morph weight set stream as a function of phoneme sequence and times associated with said phoneme sequence.’”

Addressing the defendant’s position that the claims are abstract because they do not claim specific rules, the court explained that the claimed rules “are limited to rules with certain common characteristics, i.e., a genus.” While acknowledging a greater risk of preemption, the Federal Circuit pointed out that claims to the genus of an invention, rather than a particular species, have long been acknowledged as patentable. The preemption concern arises when the claims improperly monopolize “the basic tools of scientific and technological work.” To this end, the court shifted its attention to “whether the claims focus on a specific means or method that improves the relevant technology or are instead directed to a result or effect that itself is the abstract idea and merely invoke generic processes and machinery.” The court noted that preemption, not tangibility, is the underlying concern, and emphasized “the narrower concern here is whether the claimed genus of rules preempts all techniques for automating 3-D animation that rely on rules.”

Ultimately, the court concluded that the specific structure of the claimed rules prevents broad preemption of all rules-based means of automating lip synchronization. The court noted that the claims focused on a specific asserted improvement in computer animation, i.e., the automatic use of rules of a particular type to be rendered in a specific way. The court explained that while the rules are embodied in computer software that is processed by general-purpose computers, there was no evidence that claims would preempt all uses of rules in 3-D animation or that they even encompassed the same process previously used by animators. In particular, the cited prior art discloses that “an animator’s process was driven by subjective determinations rather than specific, limited mathematical rules.” Moreover, “motion capture animation provides an alternative process for automatically animating lip synchronization and facial expressions.”

Significantly, the Federal Circuit rejected the assertion that the claims ““simply use a computer as a tool to automate conventional activity,” noting how “the incorporation of the claimed rules, not the use of the computer” improved the existing animation process. This, according to the Federal Circuit, differentiates the present case from that of Flook, Bilski, and Alice, where “the claimed computer-automated process and the prior method were carried out in the same way.”

As a result, the Federal Circuit held “that the ordered combination of claimed steps, using unconventional rules that relate sub-sequences of phonemes, timings, and morph weight sets, is not directed to an abstract idea and is therefore patent-eligible subject matter under § 101.”

CONCLUSION

In McRO, the Federal Circuit further clarified Alice and its application to computer and software-related patents. The Court reached its holding after a detailed preemption analysis in step one of the Alice test. The Federal Circuit premised its patent eligibility determination on the construction of the asserted claims, thus emphasizing the highly fact-specific nature of the Alice inquiry.  Additionally, the Federal Circuit’s decision also underscores the importance of preemption in the §101 analysis.