Patent Law Practice Center

USPTO issues patent eligibility guidance

The Federal Register Notice signed by Director Iancu on April 18, 2018, which relates to the Federal Circuit’s recent decision in Berkheimer v. HP Inc., 881 F.3d 1360 (Fed. Cir. 2018), officially published on Friday, April 20, 2018. It is good news for patent owners with computer-implemented inventions and promises to bring a much more structured prosecution pathway.

“The USPTO has issued today a Federal Register notice and memorandum to the patent examining corps in response to a recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Berkheimer v. HP Inc., 881 F.3d 1360 (Fed. Cir. 2018), pertaining to subject matter eligibility,” explained Paul Fucito, a spokesman for the United States Patent and Trademark Office in the Office of Communications. “This new guidance pertains to the second step of the Alice-Mayo framework for determining subject matter eligibility, and is focused on how examiners are to analyze and document a conclusion that a claim element is ‘well-understood, routine, conventional’ during the patent examination process.”

Berkheimer is obviously an important and helpful decision from the patentee’s perspective. The Federal Register Notice appears to also be quite helpful as well. (more…)

Federal Circuit gives hope to patentees facing patent ineligibility challenges

The Federal Circuit recently issued an important decision in Berkheimer v. HP Inc. (Fed. Cir. Feb. 8, 2018) (Before Moore, Taranto, and Stoll, J.). Giving hope to patentees who own computer-implemented inventions, the Federal Circuit ruled that it is not always appropriate to declare the broadest independent claim to be representative, and also held that questions of fact underlie patent eligibility determinations, which makes summary judgment inappropriate in at least some cases.

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Software Patentability 2017

Today, most computer innovations relate to software, at least in some important ways, and the USPTO continues to issue at least some patents for software-related inventions. No one seriously believes software will become patent ineligible per se, although it is undeniable that there is now a much steeper hill to climb than there once was. The trick is to define the invention as providing a technological solution to a technological problem. See A Guide to Software Patents and Software Patent Eligibility at the Federal Circuit.

For now, there has been no definitive statement by the Supreme Court that software is, in fact, patent eligible, although the Court has recognized at least some software-related innovation as being patent eligible. See Diamond v. Diehr. The Supreme Court also continues to consider the invention at issue in State Street Bank to be patent eligible, even if the “useful, concrete and tangible result” test does not live on.

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Deciphering TLI Communications and FairWarning IP

Beginning in May 2016 with the Federal Court’s decision in Enfish, carrying over into the July decision in BASCOM, and then into the Court’s Fall decision in McRO (sometimes referred to as “the Blue Planet case”), the patent stakeholder community finally started receiving some much-needed guidance with respect to patent eligibility of computer-implemented inventions.

While decisions where claims have been ruled patent eligible have been helpful, decisions finding claims patent ineligible have been at least as informative, at least from a patent drafting standpoint. Indeed, as important as the aforementioned pro-patent-eligible decisions are two decisions where the Federal Circuit found the claims to be patent ineligible. In TLI Communications and then more recently in FairWarning IP, LLC v. Iatric Systems, Inc., the Federal Circuit distinguished the claims at hand from those that have been held patent eligible, which help identifies brighter lines and nuances of software practice.

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Deciphering BASCOM and McRo on Patent Eligibility

The United States Patent and Trademark Office issued a new memorandum to patent examiners on recent software patent eligibility decisions from the Federal Circuit. The memo sent to the patent examining corps from Robert Bahr, Deputy Commissioner for Patent Examination Policy, provides examiners with a discussion of McRo, Inc. v. Bandai Namco Games America and BASCOM Global Internet Services v. AT&T Mobility. What follows is my summary of these two important cases.

BASCOM v. AT&T (Decided June 27, 2016)

The claims generally recited a system for filtering Internet content. The claimed filtering system is located on a remote ISP server that associates each network account with (1) one or more filtering schemes and (2) at least one set of filtering elements from a plurality of sets of filtering elements, thereby allowing individual network accounts to customize the filtering of Internet traffic associated with the account. The patent explains that the advantages of the invention are found in the combination of the then-known filtering tools in a manner that avoids their known drawbacks. The claimed filtering system avoids being “modified or thwarted by a computer literate end-user,” and avoids being installed on and dependent on “individual end-user hardware and operating systems” or “tied to a single local area network or a local server platform” by installing the filter at the ISP server. Thus, the claimed invention is able to provide individually customizable filtering at the remote ISP server by taking advantage of the technical capability of certain communication networks.

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