ok great this year yes your honor this is an appeal from decisions finding three distinct patents in valid on a motion to dismiss but this isn't far from the par alice case it can appropriately be decided on the pleadings and it was an error for the district court to sell it's undisputed that none of the three patents that issue here claims the computerized implementation of whether considering whether without considering was it claims all technological problems that existed at the time of the invention key phrase on the two questions one what record evidence shows the district court nor the time of the invention as the state of the art and two should the time of invention be relevant to determining whether something is a lot of nature or a natural phenomenon i'll take the nd question st term as to whether the time of the invention should be relevant to determine whether something is a law of nature or a natural phenomenon i don't think we need to reach that question in this case because this is a case about whether computerized inventions are computer based inventions claim an abstract idea and in that context in the context of that question i think that the time of the election vention and what we're at the time of the invention and what the state of the art was at that time is relevant because this court has and it has explained that one of the ways we determine at alice step one whether we have claims directed to an abstract idea or not is to ask the question is this an improvement i am trying to to computer technology not to yourself you're assuming here right for the sake of argument you know i mean you make the assertion it's a very broad assertion particularly because we've got three different claims here which are all quite different but you never tell i mean you make this assertion this is what the district court did you don't point to anything she's at any part of her analysis that clearly does that so even if we were hypothetically to agree with your analysis about this time thing would you give us in the briefing i mean you just you point to anything am i wrong i didn't see where you pointed to anything she said in her analysis that would support your a to two responses to that your honor st the what we pointed to in this in the reply brief is the absence of anything in the district court's decision indicating that she did consider alice step one from the time  challenge close pull and that should be taken at face value on a motion to dismiss the district court's conclusions here by not considering and not going through in her by your argument because it seems to be some of esoteric but we're looking i mean it would be more helpful to me if you point i mean it's difficult this is like three cases of one because there are three separate patterns and each of the claims rises or falls for completely different reasons but look at the five hundred and five half i don't know what you think the court should have done more than she did but this is pretty this is about data security clearance this sounds very familiar to me i've been a bureaucrat for forty five years of you in the government you have various classifications of documents and you have various clearance letters and that when you would mix one to the other seems like a very long standing well accepted practice so you can push back but so my understanding is that then you say you don't there's no recitation maclean's of how you would change the result of doing it and there's reasons i think your honor is correct that it a that access filter does does restrict access to a resource and access filters were known in the art for not claiming that this invention is d access expressly states addresses problems that are characteristic of the internet and what it allows is for a faster virtual private network because in the prior art with the patent says is every time you had an a ccess filter it did one thing and you would have to therefore process your requests through multiple filter slowing down the pathway as you went and what it said is as we make these virtual private networks larger we're bumping into a scale ability problem because we've got to put so many filters in between the request and the resource that we're burning the network and it's not efficient and so the problem that the five o five claim and this is in the claim your honor solves is let's have let's do this once let's have every access filter have a common understanding of the criteria for analyzing the request designate sensitivity levels by resource not by should we just let somebody through this firewall or not and then we'll do the filtering what's not five times between the time that the request is made and the resource is accessed that is an improvement to virtual private networks the patent says that it will make them faster which is one of the things that this court has recognized is an improvement to computing technology and so your honor i would i would respectfully push back on your characterization i think it's the same  clearance wasn't that assigning a sensitivity about your order i think your do you are conflating what you were doing and what the network was doing at that sensitivity this patent is about how does the computer network itself operate more efficiently to permit access to particular data resources and so i don't think we could come up with some tortured analogy and tried to reverse engineer something that was stunned but the patent itself says that the problem is being addressed as one that's characteristic of the internet that's a quote it says it's a difficult technical challenge was common and that's different but at the motion to dismiss level we need to take the patent at face value quite so what is this what is sufficient at the motion to dismiss to just assert that this was the difficult thing that we accomplished if the patent itself your honor says that the problem that's being addressed is a difficult technical challenge and the claims bear out that what is being addressed is that challenge and i think that the motion to dismiss relevant to what the claims if they're directed to an abstract idea even if it's a novel abstract idea it doesn't matter whether it's new or not it's step one it's an abstract idea i don't think that's correct your honor and the reason is that the test that the court gives one of the tests with the court's explained for determining whether something is directed to an abstract idea in this context is we need to look at whether it is solving a problem in tearing the computer itself or the solving some other problem that exists in the world but it uses a computer to solve the problem the show that's one way of looking at whether it actually claiming something concrete or not but if we look at the claims and say this is just claiming an abstract idea even if it's a new way of doing it it doesn't make it non abstract if it's abstract altogether i agree with that year and then we move to step two and we ask ourselves is it doing it and using inventive concept is there some element or combination of elements that isn't bent to implements the abstract idea so if we had for example a patent that was direct so let's say the abstract idea we disagree with you and agree with the that the idea of using these various security things as just an abstract idea of allowing or preventing access and things like that then move to step two what aside the abstract there's no invention of new hardware your honor but there is invention of new access filters and an access filter is a component in a computer network and what's being claimed as a novel access filter there's nothing abstract about  elements the elements is is pulling d into one access filter the analysis of four different things the source of the request the sensitivity level at the data resource the path over the internet that the request is going to take and whether it's encrypted or not and that in the level of the interruption that was never done in one place and what the patent says a column eight your honor is doing this in one place means we don't have to do it as we did it at other filters as we go through the network and that's unconventional in the same way that in bascom the opposite i would say it was unconventional era where we were moving something that had been done in one location to a different location disagree with that but i understand your honest question assume that that's part of the abstract idea the definition of sensitivity level right out of the resource and the trust level associate with what i think ation that's my id card the nd limitation is an access checker which permits the apparatus to provide the resource only if the trust level for the mode of identification is sufficient for the sensitivity level of the resource combining those two determinations in one place in the yes rather in the prior art that was two separate access filters that needed to be used to make those two determinations in this invention and claim one it's want to access filter that's unconventional at step two if we go to claim eight we have different reason is that and that is it makes the internet more useful for ordinary people and that has been found by this court in core wireless versus l g for example to be something that is not an eligible  meant was that ordinary people who didn't have the computer for sophistication to upload large amounts of data by initiating a file transfer protocol session could now do so with a website interactive web session this the pat face value if they didn't they will for the very st time wireless backup of personal devices like cell phones it transformed a process that is said have used to have to be performed with two devices in the same room and wire into a process that could be done without a wire over a mobile network and it describes a specific way of doing that and firstly there was no time  in their briefing and in the case but really ignore the claims instead they're focused their arguments focused on general statements from the specification that they allege constitute improvements over the  specifications in a vacuum really can't you know to describe the patterns as not obstruct instead the really the analysis really needs to focus on the claims and the claim like i said and then like your friend you're starting off and all yes nebulous transfer session and that interactive session why isn't that sufficient why does that not feel like communion might be an obviousness case but why does that not feel like an elder billet issue right will so i mean looking at the client you know claim twenty five that's the one with before the district court the district court relied on time one is represented either way i mean we believe that claim twenty five is the best representative ok well let's go by i mean it's a functional claim that's the problem with the way it's quite everything is kind of functional manner twenty five you know has the upload connected interactive connection server has the file transfer connection server and then this claim synchronizer and if you look at it and you look at the i mean isn't that the problem here is that the district court that all they're claiming is the idea they're not actually claiming how to do it and this is a hard on for us i think in these abstract idea cases but i think that it's the critical law is  claim is only claiming an abstract idea of something rather than claiming how to do it that it's abstract which is i think is where the district court would either but is there not enough in the specification to show what the synchronizer is know you're i there's not there's no algorithm there's no structure there's no flow chart there's nothing really i know i'm going to give it trouble yes or what twelve does but it yeah i mean in a way they are somewhat parallel ideas and that if all you've claimed is an of what their argument is is that everything was well now these two things and secretive station in the itself was well known and we just came up with this great idea that we should get a patent because we use applying sequences ation in this context or is it that in order to synchronize these things which have never been secret ised and there's a good reason to do it because it makes it more user friendly we've got some inventive concept of doing something putting words in their mouth and i'm sure that i'll be corrected when we're part of it up here but you know they're making an argument that this is a technical improvement and therefore gets out of step one and therefore they're done but that's not really the case because there's no there's no specific improvement they really cite they don't know how to do any of these things there's no code there's no there's no even real association in that in the synchronizer it just says it synchronizes the the operation of the respective connections and so it's very results oriented it's very functional but what if that's true let's assume hypothetically that your friend doesn't disagree with you and that everybody knew how to synchronise and there was nothing monumentally inventive about sickness ation but they had this idea that nobody had thought about secret this new method technological method that the uk their idea was the application of the secret ization in this context i mean that you know that that's just not present claims i mean the things that the dropbox says are all these great ideas that are in the background in the specification really don't come to the claims as your own are mentioned identifying people people or identification to to allow time old human practice and so there's a famous story following world war two of two british secret agents who were what is called a bigoted that is secure compartmented information they were married forty five years and at the end of that forty five years they revealed to each other that they had both been secret agents it when you get the picture so i mean as your honor noted i mean this is years old and this and this is well known before this plan was filed i believe in the late ninety's and the problem is all these things that they talk about as being great ideas don't flow through to the clients you know there's no real limitation of this be any sort of operation computer and so it's abstract idea and then when you get to the invent of the ins in a concept step it step two you know the specification you don't even have to look beyond anything in that intrinsic record in the specification makes clear that all of these things were well known in  need something more and that's it and it's not an obvious was not alice and that's what dropbox is almost trying to make it in this case is some sort of invention described in the five hundred and five patent written description but it didn't make it into the claims i think in a nutshell that's what what he may have been saying or maybe that's not a fair cut but i would like to address the