seemingly every weekend but i will miss her she's been awesome clerk with i move the admission of the show lost is a member of the bar and is in good standing with the highest state high score to california knowledge of her in alice the supreme court told us that the claims in deer were panic eligible because they improved an existing technological process and this court in n fission bascom apply that same principle to up hold the that communications systems are to exist in which converted and that's it from one media to another media in other words that concept was already known but the pen and point out that there were some problems with those existing technological  prior art approaches and in particular describe certain improvements that should be made to improve the prior art systems and one problem that identifies is the fact the media conversions were performed only after delivery of the message to the recipient which prevents the sender from taking advantage of terracing competitive service offerings another problem that identifies was that the prior art systems failed to provide any notification to the sender when delivery of the message and also to allow control over the location where the conversion is performed another improvement described in the strategy session is providing automatic notification to the sender when the recipient has received the invention on that point just a computer or his version of it well i think there's two points in response to that one is there's no evidence in the record that that automatic notification was used in these kind of electronic communication that's not enough i mean that's the problem it that we've got in these cases particularly when you know it can argue dear you know just doing something that was in the ordinary course of business and computerizing it doesn't make it solving a technological problem it uses a computer to make something more efficient and that in the regular business world and there's a distinction there i think that's right when it comes to looking at what is the fundamental idea of the patent and what it's directed at but when it comes to looking at whether there's an improvement that's claimed i think it is appropriate to look at what the priority it and how the patent describes the invention oh you darling i think that we should look at step two in this case and  the patent examiner specifically allowed the claim after this limitation was added after the limitation relating providing automatic notification to the center was added that's what distinguished over the prior art alternately and allowed the clean tissue so the examiner believed that that feature was not only not obvious let alone which in the conventional in the in the field at the time of the invention or we have a lot of examiners allowed that are automatic feature of it was what was of particular importance that in the scenario you're talking about your honor where you know you can send a certified letter and get a return receipt in the mail that's not an automatic return notification the liberty that involves manual intervention and that was one of the features of the in claim to prove it was providing this automatically without requiring a human to to send that message in in  here's a result it would be good to have i claim the result you have to cross the line and say identify something that would properly sensibly go under the heading of how some advance in how to achieve something how would you apply that distinction to this case well i think the first thing i'll point out is that in a close really of electric power comprehensible and hell that that was not sufficient cause i was still you know abstract idea and was only at that point the court then looked to see if there was a how here and sell i think that in the first instance the current the scribed about how there would be a protocol conversion or some some of the other things that i mean you want notification but you don't say how to get the notification if it's crossing different conventional equipment to carry out their conventional functions because the improvement is not in a better way to perform that conversion the improvement is in other features around the conversion in particular where to perform the conversion just like and ask on one of the key points of novelty was the location where the content filtering was taking place and this court held that putting that and that filtering in a new location was an the notification occurs when delivery is done that's who we're talking about is again on paragraph eight it talks about using the united states postal service for delivery the postal addresses and this is in the discussion of the database and so this will be provided the liver by the u s postal service so there it seems like there are multiple places in the us patent where it talks about manual delivery including by the united states postal service falling within the parameters of at least what's disclosed and i think arguably impressive the claims as well as are some limitation in the claims that you think excludes these routine and well electronic communication and it's transmitted as e mail or as a fax to the remote location of one presence as a refers to it where it can then be printed out and delivered so it's not  english that's not the translation that we're talking about the translation and or conversion is simply printing it out and creating a physical or tangible copy and then walking it over and handing it to someone well that is in those examples i'm not saying in the cl example the user didn't create a fax user created the message so that conversion that's that's exactly what i was hoping that you would explain to me so in this scenario you think the conversion is between the nessie age that i created by the user and the email or fax that's right there some sort of conversion but there is no description of the technology that performs the conversion hell the conversion is performed what particular conversion is performed or anything else right it's just you can get a message and we don't even know what form that message is and in this example you get a message that you should create a message that an email or fax is set and so you're saying there's a mysterious conversion that takes place where this patent doesn't have a black box that says converter but there is a mysterious conversion that takes place in this example i believe that's correct and i think the lack of specificity here reflects the fact this is not a focus of the  additional feature that you know in addition to solving the fundamental problem of control of the question of conversion in providing automatic delivery notification this is just an additional feature that's described and the fact that the pa narrowly control the location at which conversion of cars when the patentee added the phrase at different locations during prosecution the parents explain to the examiner that meant that it controls of location of conversion and that's what distinguished over please the court the district court's judgment here we respectfully request should be affirmed because the claims that issue here simply fail the two part alice test first the claims clearly are directed to an abstract idea the district court found that that idea was translation and secondly there is nothing when you review the claims that provides any sort of inventive concept it's simply a repetition in a recitation of more control the location of conversion along the way why is that not enough that is simply your honor an abstract function that is saying control something control ok sure but there is nothing in the claims that says how to do that it doesn't provide any sort of change to a network to a computer there is no algorithm there is no data structure nothing that says this is how you're going to control that it simply says to do it and that's why even if you look at just the inventive concept prong the second part of the task it's still simply an abstract idea because there's nothing that tells you how to do that it's a command that says do it but there's nothing in the claim that says happy and that's though you know in terms of a technical solution the answer is no because what the specification talks about and what the patent is really about is its conceding that conversions are done it's conceding that messages are delivered messages are sent notifications are sent back all of this is known and essentially the patent is saying all right a message is sent it's delivered and there's conversion but all of those technologies were no there's nothing that says do it differently and in fact your honor the specification says several times that the technologies issue here are purely conventional and we can see that for example at eight thirty which is which has column three lines around fifteen to twenty which essentially says that the hardware suitable for implementing the present invention includes an atlas a number of things network interfaces in the like that are well known in the industry and c i don't recall that me so tell me i mean in past and was there new equipment or just we location of certain functions from one node in the network to another your honor i believe more the latter but i think that the claims actually were very different than the claims here because in bascom certainly there were servers and there were internet service providers but what that patent was about and i think importantly what the claim that you would locate the filters at the i a ski which was something that was different and number two you would include logic at the i s p that was customized to filter for specific end users so what  that the claims and asking more about or actually making improvements to the filtering and the claim said how you do that it said locate the filter at the i s p include logic at the i s p that's customizable for the specific individual end users and we don't have anything like that in the claims what we have is something that says essentially generate a payload determine parameters for sending it convert it is necessary and then  once it's delivered send a notification back those are simply high level functions and they are not in any way changes to the claims improvements to technology as was the case and asked so what we have with respect to abstract this certainly is a claim that by any of the jurisprudence developed over the last several years is certainly abstract we have nothing that tells you in the claims how to do the conversion how to do the delivery any of that we certainly don't have anything that talks about any improvements to computer technology we have instead a claim that focuses on conventional business activity the certified mail gram for example from western union from the one nine hundred seventy s where you have a message is converted to a tell x then sent to a post office it's converted again it's then delivered in a notification sent to the sender that deliveries been accomplished that is a conventional business activity and the claim is focused on precisely that kind of activity and certainly the activity at issue here i'm sorry the claims and what were cited claims here certainly these stats can be performed by humans humans generate messages human set delivery parameters humans convert messages humans provide notifications of delivery all of this is certainly demonstrates that at its abstract and we certainly don't see anything in the claims that provides any sort of inventive concept that would that would take it outside of an abstract idea we instead as we just illustrated in the discussion of bascom have a recitation of what to do but  way how to do it and i think that it was telling in response to the discussion earlier in the questions about electric power or the question was raised about electric power there was a focus on what is in the claims that explains and and recites how to do something the response from the appellant was to look at the specification and nothing was pointed out to the court with respect to the actual claims and the actual claim language with respect to manual delivery if i may just briefly address that there's no question but that the claims however manual delivery of messages and we know that for example because claim twenty eight provides that you converting a first payload into the sealed security letter so that has to be encompassed with the notion of delivery that in turn i submit informs what it means to do something automatically because if the message is delivered manually then there has to be something manually that's done in order to provide the automatic notification so automatic notification here isn't simply a computer does something and there's this great algorithm that does that's not what's happening here all the claims certainly are broad enough to cover manual activity something that's manually initiated the united states postal service makes a delivery then a human being will have to do something to cause the notification to be sent back so there's simply nothing in the claims of that provides any sort of a inventive concept this is directed towards regular business activities and regular human activities if a court has any questions i'd be happy to answer them  this court in the supreme court tells us to look to see whether the claims are reflecting an improvement to the prior art and the parents reflects that and that should be sufficient to show that it needs the create a message that the invention determines which format to send it so in the prior art if a conversion has to be done in order to be able to be able to read it that conversion was done after it received by the recipients computer then that's a don't get all the way to the far end and then was converted the improvement or one of the improvements is being able to do that conversion ever more than one place in the system and to be able well the conversion mechanism commute looking at all these different polices ellie's different devices the local switch the server the server or the other local switch and they can control where the conversion happens in order to get certain benefits to take when i was in private practice during the period when we were transitioning between text and written letters and emails it was a common practice for us to only wanted to send a message send an e mail letter form send out by mail and also print it out and tech and fax so i controlled the conversion and sent it in various ways you know and got through the system to make sure it got to the to the individual in a format that he or she could accept because i might know if that person's email address was actually any good or if they were checking it or if their fax machine was working and i wanted it and at the failsafe i wanted to get  there through the mail i don't see how your invention is anything more than that except on a computer well i think at least one key difference is that it's not sending it in lots of different formats simultaneously it's sending it you know first me