Patent Law Practice Center

Patent Office gives examiners guidance in light of Enfish

Recently, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) sent a memo to the Examining Corps with information and instructions relating to the recent ruling in Enfish, LLC v. Microsoft Corp. by the United States Court of Appeals by the Federal Circuit. In Enfish, the Federal Circuit ruled that the software patent claims at issue were not abstract and were patent eligible. This marked the first time in 18 months, since the Court’s ruling in DDR Holdings in December 2014, that the Federal Circuit has found software patent claims to be patent eligible.

The USPTO memo was authored by Robert Bahr, who is Deputy Commissioner for Patent Examination Policy. As you would expect, it accurately explains the importance of the Federal Circuit ruling in Enfish. Bahr tells examiners that, based on the Federal Circuit ruling, they “may determine that a claim directed to improvements in computer-related technology is not directed to an abstract idea under Step 2A of the subject matter eligibility examination guidelines (and is thus patent eligible), without the need to analyze the additional elements under Step 2B.” (emphasis in the original) Bahr goes on to tell examiners that a claim that is “directed to an improvement to computer-related technology (e.g., computer functionality) is likely not similar to claims that have been previously identified as abstract by the courts.”

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Federal Circuit finds data storage software claims patent eligible

Several weeks ago, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit shook up the patent world with a somewhat unexpected gift for patent owners, particularly patent owners and applicants seeking software patents. The Court issued an important decision on software patent eligibility in Enfish LLC v. Microsoft.

The opinion by Judge Hughes, who was joined by Judge Moore and Judge Taranto, doubles the total of Federal Circuit decisions where claims in a software patent were deemed to be patent eligible because they are not abstract. In other words, DDR Holdings is no longer the only point of hope for innovators and patent owners in the software space.

This case stared when Enfish sued Microsoft for patent infringement. The patents at issue were U.S. Patent No. 6,151,604 and U.S. Patent No. 6,163,775, both issued in late 2000 and both claiming priority to the same application filed in March 1995. The ’604 and ’775 patents are directed to an innovative logical model for a computer database. A logical model is a model of data for a computer database explaining how the various elements of information are related to one another. Contrary to conventional logical models, the patented logical model includes all data entities in a single table, with column definitions provided by rows in that same table. The patents describe this as the “self-referential” property of the database.

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Quinn, Cuban talk software patents, business of innovation

Recently, IPWatchdog.com has published a series of articles relating to Mark Cuban’s activities and views relative to the patent system. (See here, here and here.) Cuban is no stranger to the patent policy debate, and has gone on the record numerous times explaining that he thinks software patents should be abolished. In fact, he famously donated $250,000 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation for the creation of the Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents.

In the comments to the aforementioned articles, Mark Cuban engaged in a spirited back and forth with readers, and with me. I invited him to do an interview with me. He agreed and we conducted an e-mail interview. To read the full interview, please see A patent conversation with Mark Cuban.

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An interview with Microsoft’s Chief Patent Counsel

Micky Minhas (pictured left) is Chief Patent Counsel for Microsoft Corporation. He is also someone that I have known for more than 20 years. Like me, Minhas is a graduate of Franklin Pierce Law Center (now part of the University of New Hampshire). What follows are excerpts from my interview with Minhas, which took place on February 20, 2015. You can read the entire interview here.

Minhas on the current state of the law and why Microsoft has adopted the European technical standard as a safe harbor approach to drafting software patent applications:

MINHAS: I think we’re in a period of uncertainty where many participants in the field are wondering where that line on subject-matter eligibility is. I view this debate as a pendulum that had State Street on one end and now it is swinging or has already swung back to the other side with Alice. That depends on how you interpret and if you see any cohesion among all the cases that we’ve seen. So I think the patent practitioner community is in a somewhat uncertain place with respect to U.S. law. In terms of our patent cases – they have been written to satisfy various standards of patentability. A few years ago we ramped up our foreign filings and recognized that we’re writing this one document, this one patent application, for so many different audiences. We started settling in on the European technical standard as a guide for how to draft, how to cover the innovation from that vantage point, in order to try to write this document that would satisfy the USPTO as well as the EPO, Chinese Patent Office, the Japanese Patent Office, and so on. So for me, what this environment means as a practitioner has more to do with how the patent is drafted and how we capture the innovation, and not really a huge difference about what the underlying innovation is or how it’s implemented.

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What every startup needs to hear about patents

Fatih Ozluturk is a prolific inventor, with 186 issued patents and 181 pending patent applications. His inventions have been licensed to every major cellular company, and have generated over $1 billion in licensing revenue. Today, Ozluturk is a Principal of the Soryn IP Group, and also Director of Patent Strategy at Liquid Patent Consulting. He is also an entrepreneur and an angel investor, he teaches workshops in the NYC startup community, and he is the author of the book “Patents. Simplified.”

I spoke with Ozluturk on the record in a lengthy interview that really should be required reading for anyone who is contemplating starting a software-based tech company. We discussed the importance of at least filing a provisional patent application even if you are not sure you want to get a patent, and we also talked about how easy it is to write software but how extremely difficult it is to write useful software. (more…)