Posts Tagged: "CLS Bank v. Alice"

Finnavations v. Payoneer: A Case Study Into a Broken Patent System

If you innovate and invest more than $10,000 to obtain patent protection on your idea, do you trust a government-issued patent to be a valid one? And if you believe you have a valid patent, would you trust that government’s judicial system to protect you from sanctions for believing in its validity? These underlying assumptions provide the foundation to any system. If you purchase and obtain title to a car, stock, or real estate, you expect that title to be valid. And you expect not to be penalized for believing in that title’s validity. For patents, it’s quite the opposite. It has become so commonplace for government-issued patents to be invalidated after issuance, we hardly bat an eye. But with the development of Section 101 law, the patent system has turned down a twisted path—one that sanctions patent holders for believing their patent to be valid. In Finnavations LLC v. Payoneer, Inc., the U.S. District court for the District of Delaware unfortunately advanced our patent system down this path

Gau Bodepudi

November 25, 2019

In CAFC Holding Finding Dice Games Abstract, Judge Mayer Delivers Concerning Concurrence

On December 28, 2018, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued an opinion in In re Marco Guldenaar Holding B.V. (2017-2465) in which the claims of a patent application directed to a dice game were held to be patent-ineligible for being directed to an abstract idea, with “the only arguable inventive concept relat[ing] to dice markings, which constitute printed matter.” The holding in the case is unsurprising post-Alice, but Judge Mayer’s concurrence reveals some concerning views on patent eligibility. The concurrence concludes by alleging that “Alice, for all intents and purposes, articulated a ‘technological arts’ test for patent eligibility.” The statute certainly does not hint at the sort of “technological arts” test that Judge Mayer would prefer and that Alice itself never required, despite Judge Mayer purportedly being concerned with precedent.

John M. Rogitz

January 11, 2019

Congress Initially Rebuffs SCOTUS Dominance of Patent Law, But Not for Long

The chaos created by this forum shopping was exacerbated by differing views of what in these rulings by SCOTUS was holding, and what was simply dicta. Together with the enactment of Bayh-Dole (which sought to alleviate the prior dismal record of commercialization of federally-sponsored research where the federal government retained the patent rights), Congress created the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit as the successor to the CCPA, as well as to supplant all other circuit courts as the arbiter of patent law jurisprudence, effective as of 1980. Creation of the Federal Circuit was also at least an implicit (and more likely, explicit) warning to SCOTUS to tread carefully on patent law jurisprudence and to let the Federal Circuit do the heavy lifting without significant interference or meddling from the highest court in the land. For almost two decades, SCOTUS seemed to heed that warning, rarely interfering with Federal Circuit precedent… But beginning with the eBay case in 2006, SCOTUS started an almost relentless series of rulings which meddle with, chastise, and overturn longstanding Federal Circuit precedent, often using the rubric that the Federal Circuit’s ruling/precedent was “too rigid,” or “too inflexible.”

Eric Guttag

December 12, 2018