Posts Tagged: "patentable"

Revising Section 101 of the Patent Act: What’s at Stake?

These revisions favor patent owners, according to Palmer, but not everyone is supportive. For instance, Bilski, Mayo, Myriad, and Alice have given several accused infringers an additional tool for fighting non-practicing entities. So. the level of support for these revisions will depend where you fall on this spectrum. That being said, Palmer does not think the Court will change its eligibility analysis in the foreseeable future, and Congress is not likely to take up these anytime soon.

Federal Circuit says Cleveland Clinic Diagnostic Patents Ineligible Under § 101

The Cleveland Clinic’s diagnostic or “testing” patents at issue dealt with a process by which an enzyme was measured and correlated against known levels of the enzyme in patients who were healthy or had cardiovascular disease. The Federal Circuit applied the two step Alice analysis, affirming a finding of Section 101 ineligibility and a failure by plaintiff to state a claim of contributory or induced infringement.

Patentability Overview: When can an Invention be Patented?

Unfortunately, the patentability requirements are frequently misunderstood. For many who are not well versed in patent law one of the reasons it can be confusing when considering patentability is due to the fact that the first of the patentability requirements asks whether the invention exhibits patentable subject matter, or is patent eligible. The question of patent eligibility leads the many anti-patent zealots and other patent newbies to erroneously conclude that if an invention is patent eligible then a patent issues. Nothing could be further from the truth. So what is required for an invention to be patented? The patentability requirements mandate that the subject matter of the claimed invention be: (1) patent eligible; (2) useful, (3) new; (4) non-obvious; and (5) described with the particularity required so that people of skill in the relevant technology field or science can understand what the invention is, make the invention and use the invention without engaging in what the law calls undue experimentation.

Through the Looking Glass: Recent Federal Circuit Decisions Do Not Change the Need for Action on Alice

The few CAFC cases (since Alice) that have found inventions to be subject matter eligible is certainly a welcome development. These cases indicate that the CAFC does not believe all computer-related inventions are ineligible, and they provide helpful clues about what will weigh in favor of eligibility. Unfortunately, these cases do not demarcate the boundary between eligibility and ineligibility in any predictable, meaningful way. We still do not have an acceptable working definition of “abstract” and we likely never will. In these cases, the CAFC applied a variety of different, often inconsistent, rationale for finding the inventions at issue to be subject matter eligible.

SCOTUS Asked to Resolve Splits in Patent-Eligibility Analysis in Context of Video-On-Demand Technology

On April 13, 2017, Broadband iTV, Inc. (“BBiTV”) filed a petition for a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court of the United States, requesting that the Court to take the case to resolve three recurring issues relating to patent-eligibility and the procedure by which courts analyze patent-eligibility… BBiTV appeals from the Federal Circuit’s Rule 36 affirmance of two summary judgment decisions in which the district court found claims of U.S. Patent No. 7,631,336, entitled “Method for converting, navigating and displaying video content uploaded from the internet to a digital TV video-on-demand platform,” to be directed to the abstract idea of “using the same hierarchical ordering based on metadata to facilitate the display and locating of video content.” Amicus briefs in support of the Petition are due by May 15, 2017.