Posts Tagged: "Two-Way Media Ltd v. Comcast Cable Communs. LLC"

Supreme Court Denies Cert in Two-Way Media v. Comcast, Refuses Another 101 Case

The U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition for writ of certiorari in Two-Way Media Ltd. v. Comcast Cable Communications, refusing to hear yet another appeal in a case involving a question of patent eligibility… Simply put, the answer to the first question asked by Two-Way Media in its Petition for Certiorari is absolutely not. There never has been a requirement that a patent claim must be — or even should be or can appropriately be — read in isolation. In fact, decisions that purport to ascertain the meaning of claim languagewithout the pomp and circumstance of Markman are openly violating the clear dictates of the Supreme Court. 

Software Patent Eligibility at the Federal Circuit 2017

If there was a theme that emerged in 2017 it is the necessity to have what is specifically innovative disclosed in the claims. While not a particularly new concept, there were cases in 2017 where the Federal Circuit acknowledged that a patent eligible innovation may well have been disclosed in the specification, but which was not found in the claims. With many legacy software patents the description of the technology (if one actually existed) was only in the specification while the claims were written to be quite broad. The Federal Circuit requires both a thick technical description of the innovation and why it is an improvement (see Enfish) and incorporation of what is innovative into the claims… What follows picks up where my 2016 article left off and provides summary and analysis of the notable software patent eligibility cases decided by the Federal Circuit in 2017.

Surviving Alice: Sufficient Inventive Concept Must be in Claim, Not Specification

In Two-Way Media Ltd v. Comcast Cable Communs., LLC, (Opinion for the court, Reyna, J.), the Federal Circuit affirmed a district court decision finding four patents owned by Two-Way Media were directed to ineligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101. Claim 1 of the ‘187 patent was representative of the ‘187 and ‘005 patents, and described a method for transmitting message packets over a communications network, like the Internet… For claims directed to judicial exceptions under § 101, a patent cannot identify a sufficient inventive concept solely in the specification and survive the Alice inquiry; the inventive concept must be found in the claims themselves in order to transform the nature of the claims into a patent-eligible application.