the court said that the abstract concept here is setting a price based in part on a buyer's participation in activity now our claims are patent eligible because they don't preempt that basic concept they don't even preempt the small park a very very small part of that concept and the air at the trial court here was in two parts two related parts first the trial court failed to appreciate the strong interrelationship among our limitations and fail to appreciate how that strong in a relationship resulted in a new way of marking products across the internet that wouldn't gauge customers in a new and exciting way and second the court applied the ultra martial decision in other presidents of this court in a way that would result the limitations in our cleated mention i think it's important to step back and look at the fact that this invention arose in one thousand nine hundred ninety the very early days of the at a time where a lot of what we take for granted about going that sales just wasn't know so with that perspective in that context let's look at the limitations of our claim it begins at the very beginning with a commitment by the buyer to buy the product at a price within a particular range so at the very beginning of our process we have a twist on what would ordinarily be done that price that is determined by a combination of factors the auction and the result of a competitive activity involving the buyer on marketing or broadcasting copyright material essentially doing what every broadcast t v channel does they put on a take the concept of an auction as a way of promoting sales on the internet and combined it with a competitive activity so that unlike the normal auction where you'd expect the high better  to get the best price that's not necessarily true here because we combine it with the competitive activity and the competitive activity isn't something that's normally  part of internet sales and it's not a normal competitive activity either it's one in which the winner of the activity doesn't necessarily get the lowest price and then we has a further qualification on this that the product that's being purchased has to be associated with a competitive activity and we give the mark mcguire card a tri example so i think if you were to apply the analysis of ultra mercial to our invention and the patent attorney were to write it in a certain way to take the auction and further recite the characteristics of what we all know an option to be then ultra martial would apply but it doesn't apply here because that's not what we did we took different concepts and made them into something that had a much greater significance and on the question of of art all these limitations abstract well me is that it doesn't claim something significantly more the dog abstract concept identified by the court and that abstract concept was basing a price on the result of a competitive activity we do something significantly more than that now if you say well an auction that's an abstraction to well then then there's there's no two part test to alice it's  activity so that you would not have an auction that would meet our limitations an option by itself our claims require that there be a competitive activity and that there also be an option that  together result in the price to be paid by the customer so you know i don't well i do agree with you but our team excludes the possibility of the single auction satisfy both the auction and the competitive activity merely described what would be involved in the guarantee across the internet that in other words these were limitations like the ones in an ultra martial that merely could have been authored by the patent attorney in a tree in an attempt to make the claim look something that was not in our case at the at the very beginning of the internet we had a gentleman who was very sophisticated in this technology and he put together a system that had never been known before and significantly during the argument before judge andrews in the district court i he said to the attorney for a have never seen anything like it and he invited the ale tourney to identify where this have been done before and the l tourney really didn't reply made no  anything that had been like this before and the judge continued well you would agree with me they should take all these limitations it's an incredibly narrow set of circumstances isn't it so what he was doing in the  oral argument on this motion was to focus on this issue of preemption which is the issue of the second part of the alice test what exactly let's just take activity and they are combined to make a price and so you think the number of hits that a particular site received is a competitive activity yes i do and i'm a blogger myself and i i dearly appreciate the fact that i compete with other bloggers and to get the maximum number of hits but again this was not something that was known at the time this is an infringement that occurred after our patent was applied when it reaches a far as to incorporate that kind of yes yes but it's not broadly close because it excludes just an enormous number almost infinite number of possible of body moments even those that would combine  auction and a competitive activity ok so on this point of the prior art i want to point out that  the other side went to some length in a very large footnote toward the end of its brief to say that earlier claims by or patente have been rejected as being obvious over the prior art well the fact is that the patent office has but certainly though to the extent that i am conflating the two it is something i'm invited to do so by the supreme court that has focused on prior art as an issue  art not through my doing but through the supreme court and through various accused infringers over the years has done that for us and i think that we would result we would obtain  very odd result if a claimed method or claim system were found to be not obvious over the prior art and the same time be so commonplace that it covers a vast swath of potential systems so that those systems would constitute a fundamental building block that we should not good morning and then it was the core because everyone agrees the claims are directed to an abstract idea the only question is whether they contain an inventive concept and they do not because they just claim the combination of two abstractions to longstanding business if you go to the spec it confirms or just add in the option to that business model is not what the applicant even claims to be inventive we know that first because every time this specification talks about what the present invention it always talks about a price to terming activity it never uses the price charming activity can be combined with quote any other way and of selling goods and services with options being just one of those examples and it then says so that for example if there is an auction then the was you know for example there's a kiosk in one store now moving out of the internet requires some inventiveness because making it on the internet cause a problem we didn't have before which is that when someone goes to that he asked they just leave me entirely in a matter see him again so you can read d v r applies to problem then it would and we call it the i think so i mean this i take the point that the court has indicated and say intellectual ventures and indeed yourself it was talking about internet centric problems i personally i wasn't reading that to be distinct from other computer center bilski that the one on one really is a device for separating technology and technological inventions from non technological inventions this is another way of saying what do really good ideas are still abstract until they're reduced to some physical innovation now because we're talking pewters we're talking tax there's one thing that would be physical but in this case you know you don't in this case obviously there are some first say there are some hard questions out there and want to one land in this case you know you don't get to one because everyone agrees structure an abstract idea and there's nothing innovative anywhere in these claims physical or otherwise technological or otherwise and gives rise to the internet patents problem in terms of overbroad because the claims just say take the one long standing business method at another longstanding this is one of the options ad conventional computer equipment period that's all the claims to profit if there's no further limitation in the claims as to how you do that which means two things one that even if there was something inventive about it it was a particularly clever event of way of combining these ideas the patent is blissfully unaware of the patent doesn't school has any difficulties in combining them patentable subject matter that google's system for charging a certain amount for for their ads based on both the auction and the combination of auction plus number of hits is itself not generated by the auction by the number of hits that somebody has got that that sounds to me to be a classic abstract in there and then the question is how do you do it that's when it happens this can just claim the concept of doing something you've got to claim a particular innovative way of doing it i think anything that's relevant because what if a lot of the complaint or the patent where you put the appears in i don't think it's really disputed but if we put the appears in because we don't have a record site for i mean i wouldn't think was right want to put it in there obviously but it's not something that's legally proceeding received a petition from the police here and there was a one of the three argument fact two grounds under one of the three were presented and the patent office decided not to institute  decision not to ensue came in may of two thousand and fifteen so going back about six months would take us to december so i would i would think it would be may of two thousand and sixteen that we would expect a final decision from the patent office on that issue if i could just address very briefly this question of combining the auction with the competitive activity a number of prior art  and since we're in the realm of baseball how bout a very common phenomenon which is various teams are bidding for the services of a particular free agent and one of the said i bet it is going to be one hundred million over seven years even though that's lower than the bid by the reds will give you an extra million dollars for every home run you hit next year the the bidding of the auction is done by the team orders the competitive activity is done by the baseball player there to all the him owners are are going to lose money if he hits a home run or but but the competitive