good morning honors and may please the court kathleen sullivan for universal secure registry the patent claims that issue in the district court appeal are all directed to a new architecture for securely processing electronic payments over a computerized network and all four recite specific techniques to solve a specific security problem in computerized networks the district court heard in dismissing the complaints based on patents supposed patent in eligibility looked at the specification you say that the problem that is being solved is the problem of network communications so five hundred and thirty nine requires and if i could highlight the most important problem is being solved the problem is can  you start st with the claim i'm not sure what language in claim twenty two requires that any of this be done on an electronic network your honor the claim read in light of the specifications makes clear that it is solving a problem that arises in why fire or computerized network transmission and the the secure data stored twenty two to you that it has to be on a computer yes your honor the time varying multi character code implies a an encrypted communication over computerized networks and that time varying multi character code is common to all of the claims of issue in the appeal and the friend the compliance with access correct your honor that before claims represent the book thems of the novel invention here what the contribution to computer security is here is that under the old technologies to have security in electronic transactions you had to try to firewall the interaction between the user and the merchant this system at the front end of the backend creates a two location or two step  doesn't mention the time varying code but we think they do all including the five hundred and thirty nine dollars of the twenty six dollars satisfy step for step one because each of them describes an improvement in the technology for dealing computer security and if i could just computerized security in other words just all the problem wouldn't arise here if we weren't in a computerized network because there would be none of the dangers that five hundred and thirty nine is solving and twenty six of solving the danger that if you use it gives information personally identifying information to the merchant and it's stored in the merchant computer or transmitted over an insecure line that can be hacked or result in interception or  techniques and having the st device in the nd device what about is there something about the combination that makes the claims directed to something that's a technological improvement yes your honor the combination and the minimum that was business under alice that too for this reason the combination of the steps in the claim provides a new alteration in the data flow old data flow was user gives personally identifying information merchants merch information and or secret information like a fingerprint or a pen that will generate a non predictable value or a one time variable code multi character code that's in all four claims except for a twenty six and the us are the universal secure registry can verify authenticate at the nd authentication step bypassing the merchant and just all that's the essence of the contributions here this is a technological means for cutting the merchant out of page appendix page two hundred and seventy three dollars and the specifications stating that this technological improvement eliminates the need for a magnetic card stripe readers at the margins point of sale eliminates the physical need for users to carry multiple separate cards to be read by those card readers and reduces the need to have secured networks because once this technological improvement isn't it isn't quiet you can sense the information that is a combination of biometric and secret information that generates multi character code to the u s s r and the us or can authenticate all without the merchant ever finding out or storing identifying information  physical tangible steps in the old technology and the specifications in all four patents make very clear that changing that technological problem the problem of insecure vulnerability to hacking and netiquette strikes raters or other ways to try to do the security at the margins point of sale that's the technological change and it involves a change in the data flow which this court is that is enough to show eligibility alteration of dataflow in the specific steps in violation of tax act and core and other cases of the court and the legal air act that to at alland step two was to look to conventional components and techniques and say that renders that three and a half minutes remaining and for mr selwyn's argument i intend to play the tone when he has concluded finished up twelve minutes unless he sees that time to mr johnson before the twelve minutes are up thank you that's very you your honor your honor to the extent that the representative claims to use a computer at all the computer is merely being used as a tool this is not an improvement in the functioning at the computer itself or in any software or hardware to represent a representative claims claim an abstract concept secure verification of identity implemented through wholly generic computer components operating in conventional ways seen this kind of panic claim repeatedly before in prison against t mobile apps carry against usa and most recently in bloom against strike and found the patent and eligible each time and that's important because this court h emphasized that assessment of patent eligibility are best done by reference to prior cases furthermore as and boom as carrion and prism the patent specification here confirms that the claims are not directed to an improvement in computer functionality or a new shooting device for example with respect to the so called universal secure registry the specifications emphasize that a quote may be any kind of database and it's not limited brief number one the time during code the patents acknowledged up to be prior art and available in off the shelf security let me try again mr selwyn i hear what you're saying i'm going to let you're right there's a lot of individual components in these claims that are emitted to be in the printer bio metrics work and here by this patent inventor right the universal code or was not invented by them i agree the question is whether the claims directed to a combination you know creating a new method using these things like biometrics that was know whether the combination is makes the claim directed to technological improvement so that's that i want you to think about you know whether the combination is you know whether how how does that satisfy section one hundred and one dollars as opposed to picking apart each element of the cl sure this case is not like bascom on like an bascom the patent specifications here contain no suggestion that the components or steps of the system are arranged in a non conventional or non generic way the use of a rd party barrier intermediary or clearing house is a building block of the modern economy and so that they can have to direct but that doesn't make it post solution activity well it is post solution activity in the sense that the abstract idea is to secure authentication before a financial transaction and this step is just involving a rd party as an intermediary and recently in the in re able case the court found a very similar claim that was directed to sending a customer's personal identification to a trusted and to marry to prevent another from having access to that information to be eligible under section one i want it's the same thing and as for the suggestion about the combination the pen specification doesn't support that in fact the very st sentence under the detail description of each patent states the opposite it says the invention  limited in the application to the details of construction and the arrangements of components set forth in the following description illustrated in the drawings so the suggestion that there is something about the ordered combination is contradicted by the specification itself and it's also contradicted by the way the specification describes how the components of the system interact or operate to give another example the user interface may be quote specification goes on to say such a system may be implemented in software or hardware or firmware communications between the interface sensors and the computer system may take place according to any protocol so between the complaint and the patents there is nothing that creates any actual basis for us hard to explain and invent of concept in an ordered combination therefore this case is like a boom like a strike case where considering a very similar  the present one this court concluded that quote the order and timing of the claim elements are merely the necessary steps of implementing the abstract idea so again every feature that u s r has identified as an improvement is one that kind of emphasizes is generic and the suggestion that was made that the complaint somehow supports there being some improvement or novelty that's just not there in the complaint the complaint makes no allegations that even assumed to be true would make the representative pattern claims eligible the complaint issuance the title and owner and inventor of each patent and then paragraphs twenty two and twenty three very big refer to us ours technology without mentioning any specific or patent or claim much less i suppose that improvement same reasoning applies to all four claims that is there are differences among the claims but they're all directed towards the same basic idea and then they mixed and mastered and claim elements all of which the specification emphasizes are what case if any of ours part part of what i hear is is something like sometimes a combination is more than the sum of its parts but not here what case are because obviously you can put together as the supreme court said and i don't know may or alice or somewhere you know most inventions involve familiar components so the putting together is very very frequently what is inventive your point here i gather is here the putting together is not inventive it's basically the equivalent of if one idea is good two forms of id is can be better and the idea of i want two forms of idea is itself abstract what if any of our cases might lend support to that distinction well the whole line of the court's cases that discuss merely  as a tool that is what these claims have done to the extent that they involve computer components they're merely using those as a tool to implement the hacks tracked idea there's no claim here to an invented new hardware or software or any other specific improvements in the technology underlying it claims and the specification could not be clearer that the plans claim no new software hardware processor programming language memory interface user interface database and so forth and there's nothing to suggest that about the combination of those components that would make it an inventive concept either again to the contrary the specification emphasizes that there is nothing special about the combination or the order of those components and when you look at the method steps themselves they're done in entirely the natural order that one would expect mr s why isn't this a case like d d r where the computer itself creates the problem that is specifically because you know the information of the user can be so easily repeated in central round when you're talking about inserting a credit card what have you and computer there's a lost of confidential financial information when you're making transactions involving computers because the claims  r were necessarily rooted in computer technology they addressed the problem of retaining website visitors in the context of the internet and those claims were found not to recite a fundamental economic  longstanding commercial practice in contrast to claims here are directed towards a fundamental economic and longstanding commercial practice and there are also one that can be done entirely in the human mind as this of the claims here can be done in pen and pencil or in the human mind and there is nothing about the combination of elements that take some out of the realm of abstraction or rather seven and that this concept combination improve computer security and one about payments in particular as it relates to the level of generality and the flow of data as to computer security us ours argument rests on a false premise really a sleight of hand the generic components themselves are the same as before but not only that how they communicate and function is the seams before their physical arrangement is the seems before the time varying code functions just as before the steps happen in exactly the same or and you can see this clearly from figure seven and eight on page two hundred and twenty five into twenty six of the appendix the only thing that's different is the information sent between the components and who receives it a rd party and the only thing supposedly more secure is the information not sent the seller never sees the credit card information that it never used to see that is not a specific technical improvement to computer security it's as ms sullivan put it altered data flow it's just rerouting information and storing it differently it's using computers as a tool to carry out a business practices all the banking essentially in an escrow format just like out us which brings me to my nd point about payments on point after point boom rejects every argument that ms sullivan makes here take level of generality the patent there we started a ten step payment system using rd party and transaction specific buyer identification codes this is how the court defined the abstract idea two words payment escrow and said this is just passing information back and forth with the rd party and it goes on to say and this is a quote use of an identification code does nothing more than overlay a nd layer  specifically identity authentication on the escrow procedure the claims are reminiscent of alice now the district court here actually used a lower level of generality than this court did in that case it said obtaining the secure a verification user's identity to enable a transaction but any suggestion that that was too low is foreclosed by boom and asgari which took an even lower level also found similar claims specifically involving a time sensitive code invalid in this court affirmed in the rule thirty six now that brings me to that aspect of inventive concept in the flow of information payments also spoke directly to that argued that used to be a buyer identifier was an inventive concept and this is why it said that because it increases online payment security without making the payment flow burdensome and removes the need for any static buyer information payment information such as credit card exact same things argument to suggest that the nomination of elements even if they are conventional is not new and unconventional the alteration of the data flow means that the merchant is not privy to as a matter of technology to the identify specification that suggests that sequence of user connecting directly to us are was in the prior technologies it's not just us our as an intermediary to verify it's having direct technology of the data flow not the concept of using an intermediary and the last point your honor would simply be that this is a motion to dismiss stage there hasn't been claim construction that might eliminate the terms in the claim specification couldn't be clearer that the old data flow involves a different kind of technology and that there are concrete practical tangible changes in the technology is true here that eliminates the need for multiple cards and for dangerous things like