Posts Tagged: "Alice Corp. Pty. Ltd. v. CLS Bank Intern"

The Federal Circuit recently reversed the District of Minnesota’s denial of summary judgment and held claims related to paper check processing invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101. Despite the claims being directed to processing “physical” checks, the Court held that “the abstract idea exception does not turn solely on whether the claimed invention comprises physical versus mental steps.”  The Court also reasserted that novelty and/or non-obviousness does not obviate ineligibility under Section 101. See Solutran, Inc. v. Elavon, Inc., Nos. 2019-1345, 2019-1460, 2019 U.S. App. LEXIS 22516 (Fed. Cir. July 30, 2019) (Before Chen, Hughes, and Stoll, Circuit Judges) (Opinion for the Court, Chen, Circuit Judge).

Just over 18 months ago, Andrei Iancu assumed control of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). As the Director of the USPTO, Iancu has changed the tone of the conversation over patents in America. During President Obama’s second term the USPTO became aggressively anti-patent and anti-innovator. The speeches, policies and inaction of Director Michelle Lee led innovators and observers to correctly claim that the Obama Administration had come to champion the viewpoints of infringers, not the technology innovators. Director Iancu changed that almost overnight. Where Director Iancu has failed, however, is with respect to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). With great fanfare, Director Iancu created a Precedential Opinion Panel (POP) that we were told would result in more decisions of the PTAB being declared precedential on the entire PTAB. There was hope that the POP would address the most important issues, such as serial challenges to the same patent over and over again, the use of the same prior art over and over again, and once and for all require the PTAB to apply the Federal Circuit view of what it means to be a real party and interest. Unfortunately, real reform of the PTAB has not happened despite tinkering with the Trial Guide. In important ways the PTAB is worse, and the efforts that have been undertaken incorrectly form the appearance of reform.

The Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Alice v. CLS Bank made it significantly more difficult to obtain patents for some computer-related technologies. it is, at best, questionable whether court decisions since then have been coherent and consistent. Similarly, marked variation has been observed across art units and across post-Alice time periods as to how examiners are applying Section 101. However, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO’s) 2019 Patent Eligibility Guidance added some much-needed clarity and predictability as to how eligibility of computer-related patent applications is being assessed at the agency. Our previous research focused on the effect that Alice and Electric Power Group had on examination trends in computer-related art units. To investigate how the new 2019 USPTO eligibility guidance has affected those trends, we updated our analysis.

On July 3, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit denied en banc rehearing in Athena Diagnostics v. Mayo Collaborative Services. The 86-page order from the Federal Circuit includes eight separate opinions—four concurring with the en banc denial and another four dissenting from the decision. The separate opinions reflect a Federal Circuit that isn’t divided so much on the issue of the importance of Athena’s now invalidated patent claims but, rather, the application of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Section 101 jurisprudence under Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories (2012). Throughout the opinions, it seemed clear that the Federal Circuit was eager to have the Supreme Court take this case up on appeal in order to clarify Mayo’s judicial exception to laws of nature and its impact on patent claims covering medical diagnostics.

On June 25, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued an opinion in Cellspin Soft, Inc. v. Fitbit, Inc. (2018-1817, 2018-1819 to 1826), reversing a district court’s grant of various Rule 12(b)(6) motions to dismiss complaints that alleged patent infringement based on U.S. Pat. No. 8,738,794 (the ’794 patent), U.S. Pat. No. 8,892,752 (the ’752 patent), U.S. Pat. No. 9,258,698 (the ’698 patent), and U.S. Pat. No. 9,749,847 (the ’847 patent). The Federal Circuit did so because the district court misconstrued precedent from both Aatrix Software, Inc. v. Green Shades Software, Inc., 882 F.3d 1121 (Fed. Cir. 2018) and Berkheimer v. HP Inc., 881 F.3d 1360 (Fed. Cir. 2018). The Federal Circuit panel consisted of Judges Lourie, O’Malley, and Taranto. Judge O’Malley authored the panel’s opinion. he Federal Circuit agreed with the district court that the claims were directed to an abstract idea but reversed anyway on the basis of the district court failing to conduct a proper Alice step two. This was because the district court ignored Cellspin’s factual allegations that, when properly accepted as true, precluded the grant of a 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss.

Since the Supreme Court issued its decision in Alice v. CLS Bank five years ago today, patent eligibility jurisprudence and practice have become increasingly chaotic—at least in the opinion of many IP stakeholders and the members of Congress who are spearheading the effort to rectify the situation. Today, to commemorate Alice’s five-year anniversary/ birthday, IPWatchdog posed the following—admittedly somewhat leading—statement to a cross-section of the IP community, and gave them a chance to agree or disagree with it. Many did not respond—including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Google—perhaps because of the sensitive moment in the history of patent eligibility law in which we find ourselves right now. However, the responses below do reflect a range of views on the impact of the case so far.

On June 19, it will be five years since the United States Supreme Court issued a decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank, 134 S.Ct. 2347 (2014), which significantly changed the way courts and patent examiners evaluated patent eligibility of computer implemented innovation in the United States. While the Supreme Court ostensibly extended the patent eligibility analysis applied in the life sciences context that had previously been adopted in Mayo Collaborative v. Prometheus Labs., 132 S.Ct. 1289 (2012), even a cursory review of allowance rates from the USPTO and invalidity rates in federal courts shows that Alice changed the prevailing analysis in profound ways. We will be commemorating this anniversary on June 24-25 in Washington, DC with a dedicated event examining the damage, discussing real solutions, and offering strategies for innovators who need protection in these uncertain times (see below for more detail). Almost immediately after Alice, patent examiners started to issue new subject-matter eligibility rejections for computer implemented innovations using the abstract idea exception to the statutory categories of patent eligibility. “The ubiquity of subject-matter eligibility rejections in office actions exploded, leading many to wonder whether software implemented inventions remained patentable at all,” explained Kate Gaudry and Samuel Hayim, who have done a series of articles on IPWatchdog detailing their statistical analysis. “This effect was largely centered in business method art units of [USPTO technology center] (TC) 3600. For example, the number of allowances issued from business-method art units dropped from 24% in the months before Alice was decided to about 3% in months after.” For months there has been growing hope that a legislative fix spearheaded by a few dedicated Members of Congress would provide a solution. But in recent weeks, that hope is waning as the uncomfortable reality that big tech is dominating the discussions has started to set in.

In each of the recent Federal Circuit decisions on medical diagnostics inventions, Athena Diagnostics v. Mayo Collaborative Services, 2017-2508, (Fed. Cir. Feb. 6, 2019) (“Athena”) and Cleveland Clinic Found. v. True Health Diagnostics LLC, 2018-1218 (Fed. Cir. April 1, 2019; non-precedential) (“Cleveland Clinic II”), the court affirmed a district court ruling that found a medical diagnostic or a related patent invalid for being directed to ineligible subject matter. Athena and Cleveland Clinic II follow the hard stance taken by the Federal Circuit against medical diagnostics inventions, first in Ariosa Diagnostics, Inc. v. Sequenom, Inc., 788 F.3d 1371, 1376 (Fed. Cir. 2015) (“Ariosa”) and next in Cleveland Clinic Found. v. True Health Diagnostics LLC, 859 F.3d 1352, 1361 (Fed. Cir. 2017) (“Cleveland Clinic I”). In Athena, the patent covered a method for diagnosing a disease in a subpopulation of affected individuals based on the discovery of a correlation between the disease and certain autoantibodies found only in that subpopulation. In Cleveland Clinic I, the patent claims were directed to diagnosing the risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (CVD) based on the correlation between elevated levels of a protein found in the blood and occurrence of atherosclerotic CVD. In Cleveland Clinic II, the claims were directed to methods of identifying elevated levels of the protein but did not include any recitation of the correlation…. The requirement for an improvement to the technology involved in carrying out the claimed method is a steep hurdle for the eligibility of most medical diagnosis inventions, since the essence of such inventions is applying a newly discovered correlation to deliver a practical benefit—not improving the technology used to provide the diagnosis. In this regard, medical diagnostic inventions are unique. This point was highlighted by the Athena dissent through reference to the amici curiae Five Life Sciences Patent Practitioners’ brief, which stated, “[medical] diagnostic methods . . . are so tightly bound to underlying natural laws and phenomen[a], they are especially susceptible to undue expansion of the eligibility standards…” Athena Dissenting opinion at 13.

Since having been sworn in as the new director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in February 2018, Andrei Iancu has led the charge to improve predictability of patent-eligible subject matter. In his speech at the Intellectual Property Owners’ (IPO) Association’s annual meeting in Chicago in late September 2018, the director told IPO’s membership that the USPTO is “contemplating revised guidance to help categorize the exceptions [to patent eligibility]—and indeed to name them—and instruct examiners on how to apply them.” Moreover, Director Iancu had created a new post that coordinates between the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) of the USPTO and the examining corps, and he installed former PTAB Chief Judge David Ruschke to that post in August 2018. True to his word, on January 7, 2019, Director Iancu issued “2019 Revised Patent Subject Matter Eligibility Guidance,” which explains how U.S. Patent Examiners should analyze patent-eligibility questions under the judicial exception to 35 U.S.C. § 101. See 84 Fed. Reg. 50-57 (Revised Guidance). In less than two weeks since the Revised Guidance, the PTAB issued two decisions reversing examiners’ 35 USC § 101 rejections based on the Revised Guidance—ex parte Rockwell, Appeal No. 2018-004973, Jan. 16, 2019; and ex parte Fanaru, Appeal No. 2017-002898, Jan. 22, 2019.