yes we think this is a step one case and i can explain why but to specifically answer your question this is an invention if you look at the claim that has three components st of all there are two time periods that are controlled the news there is this retention time period and then there's the pla playing the audio visual work and then rd the control information is sent along with the file so that it operates on the file even if the file even if the audio visual file has been downloaded and here's why that's important to understand that this is that particular solution to a digital problem a particular digital problem in a digital solution as opposed to a range of solutions because what's happening here with the control information being sent on the file is that the rules can operate on the video even if it's not connected to a network a person can download a file onto the device that they're going to use a to watch a movie and if the rules aren't met then the file is not available in the longer it's as if the file disappears that's not something that can happen in the bricks and mortar world with checking out a book from the library a d anything like that because a person could keep the d v d or the book or whatever it is for a time period beyond what is authorized but here we're talking about two time periods the wools in which they're put together and the way in which they operate and so that really is subject matter that's patent eligible it's not the idea of a solution it's a particular solution in the digital content and that's where we think the district court here got it wrong was it was looking at this patent these patents this representative claim and way too high a level of generality it in alice step one said that this is just patent that structed to the idea of restricting access to a file based on rules and saying that is like saying that a patent for a particular type of v the engine is directed towards operating a car it just doesn't account for the various particular limitations in the patent and if this court's jurisprudence on alice i think has taught us anything it's you can't just come up with the highest level of abstraction possible you have to actually look at what is the claim do here is it a solution or is it just the idea of a solution and so here those three components that i described are what provide the solution and they are only minimally preemptive because there are a number of other ways in the digital context you could have a solution so i'd like to talk a little bit more about that what was in the prior art and the particular innovation that had how truly now maxell made here so at the time that this invention was made it was one thousand years ago in the year two thousand and frankly things were very different in terms of video downloads and video streaming the specification in this case describes the prior art which was quite minimal it describes thirty three ideas that were manifested in that the five hundred and twenty two patent issued in twenty seven yes but the priority date is in the year two thousand and so that is the relevant time period there was an originally a pandemic legation filed in the year two thousand in japan then the application was filed in the us in two thousand and one there were continuation applications filed but the relevant time period is what was happening in the year two thousand and things that might seem commonplace today were not commonplace at all then what the specification tells us in terms of the prior art was that there were a few ideas out there and some of them weren't related to time periods at all one of the ideas was we have a problem with the digital copy being able to be transmitted across networks in an infinite number of copies made so why not give a degraded copy so that if it's so that you wouldn't want to copy it and send it and send it so the st patent that's mention the st reference involves a degraded copy the nd reference that's mentioned involves controlling the number of copies only allow a person to make one copy but that would not that does not solve the problem of the same way that the time periods do here because the person could keep watching that one copy over and over and over again it could let all their friends watch the copy etc and then the rd reference that's disclosed in the prior art is essentially a ninety minute playback period that's almost operating like a d v r recorder where you could record what's happening in real time for ninety minutes and then watch it back within the ninety minutes and that's all that's disclosed so what the patent here says and the innovation here is recognizing that you need to balance the rights of the copyright owners who will have to pay for especially distributors who will have to pay the copyright owners for however many copies are sent out for people to watch however long they're sent out to watch those copies balance that against the rights of the person who wants to watch the video the user and the innovation that the touchy engineers made here was to recognize that the user probably only wants to launch to watch the video once but it might not do it right away when it downloads the video which is why they described our attention period which could be something like thirty days in which you have to watch the video sometime within that retention period but then also that there's a more narrow period once you start watching the video you basically have only a certain amount of time to watch it and you can't watch it again and that's when you look at the claims here exactly what it says it talks about reproducing the audio visual information according to the control information the st wearing clause talks about the two periods of time in the control information the retention period and then the playback to hear ian and then the nd where in clause gives a series of rules that talks about where are you within those two periods and if you're not within the rules that are set out that it disables the start of relief production it disables the watching the video and so this is not the idea of restricting access in the abstract or even restricting access based on time there are particular time periods particularly two different ones that are used together which had not happened at all up to that point in the digital context and then it's describing that they're sent along with the file can i construction issue as it comes to the court there was a question below about what control information means but here i believe it is agreed upon that what we're looking at is essentially the three elements of this claim which are the use of two controls the rules by which they work together and the fact that they're sent along with the audio visual file if i could just discuss a little bit more why it matters that they're sent along with the audiovisual file because i think it's very important a preemptive a fact i mean one of the things that this court in the u supreme court of said in the alice context is you know the concern about abstract ideas is that we don't want to take things off the table in terms of scientific and technological innovation we don't want to take math formulas or laws of nature or natural phenomena off the table so the question is you know is this a specific solution or is it taking too much off the table and our answer is there is there are a number of possible solutions out there in the digital contacts this is only one to try and it is minimally preemptive and if i could just give an example which i think is pretty real world based on users today you could imagine a circumstance which uses time limitations but is nothing like the claim that's here in that there has to be some type of real time control of the the video file so the video would have to be watched over so if the video were watched in real time and it was streamed but you'd have to stream the control information along with the video almost like the way that a cable box works where you need to have a constant signal the signals that are not there you can't watch it anymore if the control information didn't say ok based on the rules you couldn't watch it anymore and that would be a solution where basically you'd have to be you know the whole time and you could still use something like that and so what guidance  minimally sufficiently preemptive or minimally present preemptive so do you have any place we would look for guidance in that regard sure i think you could look to other cases that this court has decided about a particular way of doing had to do with using a set of rules to animate facial expression i would also point the court to the court wireless case which had to do with the at with having an application summary window that allows is allows users users especially on a small screen to be able to access data  more easily but you know i think the reason that this court has described has addressed preemption is because when it's asked this question you know is this and invention that's directed to an abstract idea you know what the the words i struck the idea themselves are hard sometimes to put some content on and so the court has looking for guidance from the u s supreme court about you know really what is it well worried about we're worried about taking too much off the table in terms of was of nature math formula etc etc so here are we taking a lot off the table i so in the both of those i think because i mean i think that you i'm sorry i think that your problems are getting i'm happy i'm happy to address those because i think that they're both fundamentally different so the s a p case addressed essentially mathematical algorithms so a method of using statistical analysis for investment information and the court said this isn't telling us how to do it in any way connected to the physical world it's essentially just math and it doesn't matter if it's more specific math it's  and you can't take math functions and algorithms off the table because it will stop scientific innovation and development and so i would put s a p t which had that language about a more narrow rule still not being sufficient in broadly the math category i in a slightly different category which is taking a solution that exists in the bricks and mortar world and just doing it on a computer and particularly doing something that this court has found is not is is abstract in a number of cases which is collecting information analyzing information and reporting it back so that this was just a question about indexing with databases and the suppose that innovation in the b s t case was we're going to look at the past data that's been used to set parameters for a database we're going to tell you what that is and then you can decide whether you want to use those to set the parameters for your database and i think this court said that's essentially something that you know you do in the bricks and mortar world when you're designing a database or if you're designing a spreadsheet it's just indexing it's directed to the abstract idea of indexing there's nothing special about using a computer as also i think the teaching of the supreme court's cases in alice in bilski when you're just taking a bricks and mortar idea and there's nothing special about you know using the computer  it's directed to an abstract idea and so the difference i think between the b s d case and cases like it is that here we have a uniquely digital problem and it required a uniquely digital solution and i think looking at some of the real world examples in the briefs is a good way to to think about that because i think one of the things fandango suggested is this is just like alice or bill ski because we're just it's just like taking a book out from the library and you're just putting in a rule that saying like you can only have the book out from the library for a certain number of days and we don't think that's true because the book from the library can't be perfectly reproduced at almost no cost it can't be transmitted to get across networks you know nearly instantaneously the digital problem is that you have you know potentially perfect you know millions of perfect copies that could really hurt the rights of the copyright owner and you needed a way to deal with that and the solution you know the fact that a copy would degrade or that you really couldn't make the copies economically in the bricks and mortar world would not be a solution in the digital world but there's something that you can do in the digital world that you can't do in the bricks and mortar world which is if you can expand centrally make the content disappear if someone takes out a book from the library and they keep it for too long at least under technology that i'm aware of there's nothing that makes the book disappear someone could have been something like that and that was all they don't have to use to be ok there may well it's with the libraries that i frequent there is not any mechanism that causes the book to disappear after the twenty one day period but that is something that you can do in the digital world and that's really the innovation here is that you can have these two different time periods in these rules that operate on the files that the pile is just no longer available so there's no opportunity to keep it for a longer there's no opportunity to send it on there's no opportunity to make copies you're willing to hear about  never made to because element does not appear in the claim and that's what i'd like to focus this court on the claim and it's the only claim that's that issue if you look at the claim it's not technological and it's not specific in any way there's no information about how the functional steps of transmitting receiving storing a reclusive or achieved in fact there isn't even a mention of the computer in the client one could read that one could say that this claim covers a store clerk handing a videotape to a person along with a written set of instructions would say here are the rules about how you you know how long you can keep this and when you can play it in fact the claim doesn't even say whether the user is required to be told about these time periods or not none of that is in their control information as the parties have agreed is just a set of temporal restrictions my you made reference to limitations on the number of copies that's not in here this case it could be a completely different case if what you were about was this back at the time frame and there's no evidence about this because the  claim doesn't post the solution back at the time frame it was difficult or impossible to embed it in digital media that you gave to somebody the ability to know when it st started playing and the claim claims a solution to that would come up in the technological way of doing that that's not in the one there's nothing about how you detect there's nothing about how you turn it off the turning off could just be some employee pressing a button manually it's just not in the claim and this is the only claim we're talking about so i would submit and by the way the only language that i think you could tie my friends argument to a response to your st question was the language according to the control and for that's not a construed term i don't think you can fairly read the particular point that she made and for that language i would say that this case is very similar indeed exceedingly close to the smart flash case and it is miles and miles away from the cases where this court has held that there has been an improvement to the way the computer functions a technological solution to a technological problem we don't have any of that here now i thought it was it was very interesting that it is so hard to characterize  case step one case and i think that was probably wise although there was discussion of step two in the brief this court and the s g road it has been clear since alice that acclaimed inventions use of the eligible and here their argument below in their arguments in the briefs was that what makes this significantly more something different is the concept of these two time periods and they talk about how specific the time periods are let me just pose one example that i think points out how how that argument doesn't work let's say that the nd time period was you can only watch the movie on weekends or you can only watch the movie on tuesday nights or you can only watch the movie on tuesday nights when it's when the time slots that up against a particular program that's essentially what they have now it would be a very different  if you planned it that way and you said and here is technologically how you do that and here's why you couldn't do that with the prior art and we fix that but that's none of this back and certainly not in the claims and it's not something that they're targeted at all  so again looking looking at the case law i was trying to find a case where this court had held that something was eligible as not reflecting as not being directed to an abstract idea with the language didn't appear in this court's decision about an improvement to computer technology or a technological solution to a technological problem and i would say they're completely irrelevant here because there's no going on the claim all those cases talk about specific improvements to the ways the way the computer computers operate we don't have that here they essentially i thought they conceded that point in their and i see that my friend is trying to sort of resurrect the argument that maybe there's some technological cool no that you want to read into the language of courting to the control information but again it wasn't presented below it wasn't presented on appeal and start fashion change when you're going from eleven sound to another sound and you can hold up those two claims not just to specify the specificity of the sounds and i'm sorry not just how technological the claim which sounds an integral but we really drill down into it what you have there is something which was a really huge technological advance where you have here is just the idea of two time periods and walrond two time periods it's really only one time for it because when you read something in every rental an essential part of that is the time period so every rental every software license is going to have a time period so what additional do they put into what they put in addition a nd time period which is that once you start watching it you have a certain period of time during which you have to finish and sort of like a three day pass or a seven day pass that disney world i think we ha just briefly and that's where it is in thirteen response your opposing counsel where as i'm sure this language that refers to reproducing the audio visual information according to the control information related to the audio visual information that describes the fact that the control information it is reproduced according to the control information which is related to the audio visual information it can only be played under those circumstances which means that control information asked to be there sent with the understood this could be on the tape of the claim and so i think that's important we're not talking about time periods in the abstract we're talking about a two time period specific tools and a specific way that they work and the district court here just can't be correct because it looked at th