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 Revisits IPR Estoppel in Ironburg Inventions LTD. v. Valve Corp.

Maier & Maier

Ironburg Inventions LTD. v. Valve Corp., 21-2295 (Fed. Cir. 2023)

This case presented the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit with an opportunity to clarify the standards for determining estoppel of invalidity grounds in inter partes review (IPR) pursuant to 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2).

Ironburg initially sued Valve in 2015 for infringement of their U.S. Patent 8,641,525 (the ‘525 patent) which describes a handheld video game controller with the particular innovation of back control buttons. Valve’s “Steam Controller” included similar back buttons. The trial took place in 2021 over Zoom with the jury returning a verdict of willful infringement by Valve and awarding over $4 million in damages to Ironburg. Both parties appealed.

Valve raised on appeal the arguments that: first, the claims of the ‘525 patent are invalid as indefinite; second, that Valve is entitled to judgment as a matter of law because trial record contained insufficient evidence to find infringement, or alternately that Valve is entitled to a new trial because the trial court erroneously allowed a co-inventor to provide testimony wile Valve’s genera counsel’s testimony was excluded; third, the district court erred in denying Valve’s motion for judgment as a matter of law on the issue of willfulness, or alternatively for a new trial on willfulness; and fourth, Valve should not have been estopped from asserting prior art grounds against the ‘525 patent. Ironburg’s cross-appeal for enhanced damages was dismissed as the district court was within its discretion to decline a grant of enhanced damages.

The appeals court dismissed Valve’s first arguments for indefinite claims. The terms describing the controller back buttons as “elongate member[s]” “substantially the full distance between the top and bottom edge” were found clearly, to a person of ordinary skill in the art, to be descriptive of long buttons spanning the length of the back of the controller which are accessible to the users third, fourth, and fifth fingers.

Judge Clevenger’s dissenting opinion on this issue contends that the “extends substantially the full distance between the top edge and bottom edge” language is indefinite because it gives a person of ordinary skill in the art no certain boundaries for starting and ending such a measurement. He finds that the district court merely “held ipse dixit that Valve did not carry its burden” for proving that this language is indefinite without properly addressing Valve’s measurement argument.

Valve’s appeal for judgment as a matter of law was dismissed by the appeals court based on finding that the jury was provided with substantial enough evidence to reach their conclusion. A significant factor in this finding was the fact that each juror had an actual Steam Controller sent to their homes for hands-on examination. The alternate appeal for new trial was also dismissed because the district court was found to have acted within its discretion in excluding Valve’s proffered testimony.

The appeals court did find that the district court erred as to Valve’s third issue on appeal regarding willfulness, however the error was harmless and thus the denial of Valves motions was upheld.

Valve’s fourth issue on appeal resulted in a significant clarification to the standards for Non-Petitioned Grounds estoppel in IPR review. Valve presented four grounds for invalidity, two Non-Instituted and two Non-Petitioned. The appeals court found that the district court was correct in estopping the two Non-Instituted Grounds because they were included in Valve’s initial IPR petition but not instituted by the Patent and Trademark Office. Valve chose not to seek remand for this decision and therefore forfeited their claim against estoppel.

In contrast, estoppel of the Non-Petitioned Grounds was vacated and remanded. The “standards by which a determination is to be made as to what invalidity grounds not presented in a petition are estopped” had not yet been addressed by the appeals court. Thus, the district court was left to look to other district court rulings, and erroneously placed the burden of proof on Valve for determining whether “a skilled searcher conducting a diligent search reasonably could have been expected to discover” the grounds in question. The appeals court held instead that “the burden of proving, by preponderance of the evidence, that a skilled searcher exercising reasonable diligence would have identified an invalidity ground rests on the patent holder, as the party asserting and seeking to benefit from affirmative defense of IPR estoppel.”

The court’s holding on Valve’s fourth issue on appeal will have significant impact on litigation concerning IPR estoppel moving forward, as patent owners have now been strapped with a new burden of proof in defenses against invalidity.

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.