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Parties Involved:
Active Network, Inc.
Appellee
General Automobile Insurance Services, Inc.
Appellee
Internet Patents Corporation
Appellant
Permanent General Assurance Corporation of Ohio
Appellee
Quinstreet, Inc.
Appellee
Tree.com, Inc.
Appellee

Document Text:

United States Court of Appeals 

for the Federal Circuit ______________________ 

INTERNET PATENTS CORPORATION, 

f/k/a Insweb Corporation,

Plaintiff-Appellant

v.

ACTIVE NETWORK, INC., THE GENERAL

AUTOMOBILE INSURANCE SERVICES, INC.,

d/b/a The General, Permanent General Assurance 

Corporation, PERMANENT GENERAL

ASSURANCE CORPORATION OF OHIO,

QUINSTREET, INC., TREE.COM, INC.

Defendants-Appellees

______________________ 

2014-1048, 2014-1061, 2014-1062, 2014-1063

______________________ 

Appeals from the United States District Court for the 

Northern District of California in Nos. 3:12-cv-05036-

JSW, 3:12-cv-05035-JSW, 3:12-cv-06506-JSW, 3:12-cv06505-JSW, Judge Jeffrey S. White.

______________________ 

Decided: June 23, 2015

______________________ 

JOSEPH GRECO, Beck, Ross, Bismonte & Finley, LLP, 

San Jose, CA, argued for plaintiff-appellant. Also represented by JUSTIN BECK, KIMBERLY ZAPATA. 

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2 INTERNET PATENTS CORPORATION v. ACTIVE NETWORK, INC. 

MATTHEW D. MURPHEY, Troutman Sanders LLP, Irvine, CA, argued for defendant-appellee Active Network, 

Inc. Also represented by MEGHAN CANTY SHERRILL. 

JOHN FRANCIS TRIGGS, Patterson Intellectual Property 

Law, P.C., Nashville, TN, argued for defendants-appellees 

The General Automobile Insurance Services, Inc., Permanent General Assurance Corporation of Ohio, Quinstreet, 

Inc. Defendants-appellees The General Automobile 

Insurance Services, Inc., Permanent General Assurance 

Corporation of Ohio also represented by RYAN D. LEVY. 

Defendant-appellee Quinstreet, Inc., represented by 

THOMAS F. FITZPATRICK, ANDY H. CHAN, Pepper Hamilton 

LLP, Redwood City, CA.

STEPHEN S. KORNICZKY, Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & 

Hampton LLP, San Diego, CA, argued for defendantappellee Tree.com, Inc. Also represented by EDWARD V.

ANDERSON, DEEPALI BRAHMBHATT, MICHAEL MURPHY. 

______________________ 

Before NEWMAN, MOORE, and REYNA, Circuit Judges.

NEWMAN, Circuit Judge. 

Internet Patents Corporation (IPC) appeals the judgments of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, dismissing the complaints in 

four related actions for infringement of U.S Patent No. 

7,707,505 (the ’505 Patent) on the ground of patent ineligibility under 35 U.S.C. §101.1

IPC had filed suits for infringement of the ’505 Patent

against The General Automobile Insurance Services, Inc. 

 

1 Internet Patents Corp. v. Gen. Auto. Ins. Servs., 

Inc., 29 F. Supp. 3d 1264 (N.D. Cal. 2013) (“Dist. Ct. 

Op.”).

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INTERNET PATENTS CORPORATION v. ACTIVE NETWORK, INC. 3

(“The General”); Active Network, Inc. (“Active”); Tree.com, 

Inc. (“Tree.com”); and QuinStreet, Inc. (“QuinStreet”). 

The district court, applying 35 U.S.C. §101, held the ’505 

Patent invalid for failure to meet the eligibility requirements of patentable subject matter. IPC appealed, and 

while the appeal was pending, the Supreme Court decided 

Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, 134 S. Ct. 2347 

(2014). We requested, and received, supplemental briefing addressing the relevance of Alice to this case. We now 

affirm the judgment of the district court.

BACKGROUND

As the district court stated, the ’505 Patent claims 

“the use of a conventional web browser Back and Forward 

navigational functionalities without data loss in an online 

application consisting of dynamically generated web 

pages.” Dist. Ct. Op. at 1269. The court described the 

’505 Patent subject matter as “retaining information lost 

in the navigation of online forms,” id., and deemed this to 

be an abstract concept and thus ineligible for patenting: 

The Court finds that by setting out the abstract 

idea of a known technological challenge without 

setting out any specific disclosures, the Patent 

“added no elements or combination of elements, 

sometimes referred to as the inventive concept, 

sufficient to ensure that the patent in practice 

amounts to significantly more than a patent upon 

the natural law [or the abstract idea].”

Id. (alteration in original) (quoting Mayo Collaborative 

Servs. v. Prometheus Labs., Inc., 132 S. Ct. 1289, 1294 

(2012)).

Claim 1 is the broadest claim:

1. A method of providing an intelligent user 

interface to an online application comprising the 

steps of:

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4 INTERNET PATENTS CORPORATION v. ACTIVE NETWORK, INC. 

furnishing a plurality of icons on a web page displayed to a user of a web browser, wherein 

each of said icons is a hyperlink to a dynamically generated online application form set, 

and wherein said web browser comprises Back 

and Forward navigation functionalities;

displaying said dynamically generated online application form set in response to the activation 

of said hyperlink, wherein said dynamically 

generated online application form set comprises a state determined by at least one user 

input; and

maintaining said state upon the activation of another of said icons, wherein said maintaining 

allows use of said Back and Forward navigation functionalities without loss of said state.

A principal issue is whether the additional limitations in 

other claims of the ’505 Patent rescue this method from 

ineligible abstraction. IPC argues that the invention is 

not an abstract idea, but a tangible and useful improvement over prior computer-implemented methods of entering information into online application forms. The 

specification states:

In contrast to the prior art, the present system, in 

all its embodiments, maintains virtual application 

information, relative dependencies, and information context obtained and/or derived from each 

pane accessed by the user/applicant.

’505 Patent, col. 9 ll. 60-66. IPC states that the specified 

limitations remove the claims from abstraction, citing the 

“maintaining state” limitation, the furnishing of icons as 

separate hyperlinks to an online application, and using 

the Back and Forward buttons without losing data previously entered in the application form. IPC states that its 

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method is a technical advance over the prior art, referring 

to the Court’s guidance in Alice. 

The district court held that the several claimed steps

did not add an inventive concept, including the “maintaining state” limitation on which IPC focuses on appeal.

DISCUSSION

I 

Section 101 defines patent eligible subject matter as 

“any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or 

composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof.” Precedent has long established that eligible subject matter does not include laws of nature, 

natural phenomena, and abstract ideas. Other than as so 

limited, the patent system is described as available to 

“anything under the sun that is made by man.” Diamond 

v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303, 309 (1980) (quoting S. Rep. 

No. 1979, 82d Cong., 2d Sess., 5 (1952); H.R. Rep. No. 

1923, 82d Cong., 2d Sess., 6 (1952)). Yet the technologies 

of recent decades have challenged the understandings of a 

simpler past.

Recently, the courts have focused on the patent eligibility of “abstract ideas,” for precision has been elusive in 

defining an all-purpose boundary between the abstract 

and the concrete, leaving innovators and competitors 

uncertain as to their legal rights. The present framework

starts with the case of Bilski v. Kappos, 561 U.S. 593

(2010), where the Court held that the generally known 

idea of hedging commodities is not rescued from “abstraction” through the use of computer technology.

In Mayo, supra, the Court introduced the “inventive 

concept” protocol to probe the categories of laws of nature, 

natural phenomena, and abstract ideas. The Court set 

forth a two-step methodology for determining patenteligible subject matter. “First, we determine whether the 

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6 INTERNET PATENTS CORPORATION v. ACTIVE NETWORK, INC. 

ineligible concepts.” Alice, 134 S. Ct. at 2355. If so, the 

court then considers the elements of each claim “both 

individually and ‘as an ordered combination’ to determine 

whether the additional elements ‘transform the nature of 

the claim’ into a patent-eligible application.” Id. (quoting 

Mayo, 132 S. Ct. at 1298, 1297).

The Court described this second step as “a search for 

an ‘inventive concept’—i.e., an element or combination of 

elements that is ‘sufficient to ensure that the patent in 

practice amounts to significantly more than a patent upon 

the [ineligible] concept itself.’” Alice, 134 S. Ct. at 2355 

(alteration in original) (quoting Mayo, 132 S. Ct. at 1294). 

By “consider[ing] all claim elements, both individually 

and in combination, [this methodology] is consistent with 

the general rule that patent claims ‘must be considered as 

a whole.’” Alice, 134 S. Ct. at 2355 n.3 (quoting Diamond 

v. Diehr, 450 U.S. 175, 188 (1981)).

Under step one of Mayo/Alice, the claims are considered in their entirety to ascertain whether their character

as a whole is directed to excluded subject matter. However, this determination alone does not render the subject 

matter ineligible. In Mayo, the excluded subject matter 

was a law of nature, “namely, relationships between 

concentrations of certain metabolites in the blood and the 

likelihood that a dosage of a thiopurine drug will prove 

ineffective or cause harm.” 132 S. Ct. at 1296. The Court 

distilled this ineligible concept from the claims as a whole, 

and found no inventive concept in routine application of 

this law of nature.

In Alice, the Court found that the claims were directed to the abstract idea of intermediated settlement, 

and that no claim elements, alone or in combination, 

provided the inventive concept of patent-eligible subject 

matter. 134 S. Ct. at 2356. The Court held that the 

known practice of reducing financial risk by passing funds 

through a “third-party intermediary” did not lose its 

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INTERNET PATENTS CORPORATION v. ACTIVE NETWORK, INC. 7

character as an abstract idea. Although computer capability achieved financial activity of a scope not previously 

available, no inventive concept was found in the claims, 

for the “computer functions are ‘well-understood, routine, 

conventional activities’ previously known to the industry.” 

Id. at 2359 (quoting Mayo, 132 S. Ct. at 1294).

The two-step analytic protocol introduced in Mayo directs attention to whether the claim contains an “inventive concept.” Determination of what is an inventive 

concept favors inquiries analogous to those undertaken 

for determination of patentable invention, for a known 

idea, or one that is routine and conventional, is not inventive in patent terms, as the Court found in Bilski, 

Mayo, and Alice. For Bilski and Alice, the conventional 

idea was based on the use of computers to conduct known 

forms of financial transactions. For Mayo, the Court held 

that metabolism of the drug thiopurine is a law of nature, 

and that instructing physicians to administer the drug 

according to its presence in the blood “at most add[s] a 

suggestion that he should take those [natural] laws into 

account when treating his patient.” 132 S. Ct. at 1298; id. 

at 1297 (“The relation is a consequence of the ways in 

which thiopurine compounds are metabolized by the 

body—entirely natural processes. And so a patent that 

simply describes that relation sets forth a natural law.”).

Other precedent illustrates that pragmatic analysis of 

§101 is facilitated by considerations analogous to those of 

§§102 and 103 as applied to the particular case. The 

courts have recognized that it is not always easy to determine the boundary between abstraction and patenteligible subject matter. Recent precedent illustrates this 

boundary in a variety of factual circumstances. E.g., 

CyberSource Corp. v. Retail Decisions, Inc., 654 F.3d 1366, 

1375 (Fed. Cir. 2011) (claims linked only to a general 

purpose computer preempted the abstract concept of 

detecting credit-card fraud based on past transactions); 

Dealertrack, Inc. v. Huber, 674 F.3d 1315, 1333-34 (Fed. 

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8 INTERNET PATENTS CORPORATION v. ACTIVE NETWORK, INC. 

Cir. 2012) (“computer aided” mental process claims, 

unlimited in scope, preempted the idea of “selectively 

forwarding” credit data); Accenture Global Servs., GmbH

v. Guidewire Software, Inc., 728 F.3d 1336, 1344-45 (Fed. 

Cir. 2013) (claims that implemented the abstract idea of 

generating tasks based on rules on the occurrence of an 

event, held ineligible because they preempted all practical 

uses of the abstract concept); Digitech Image Techs., LLC 

v. Elecs. for Imaging, Inc., 758 F.3d 1344, 1351 (Fed. Cir. 

2014) (claims to a general process for combining two data 

sets into a device profile were “‘so abstract and sweeping’ 

as to cover any and all uses of a device profile” (quoting 

Gottschalk v. Benson, 409 U.S. 63, 68 (1972))).

Precedent illustrates not only the variety of concepts 

that have been challenged under section 101, but the 

variety of details that may be included in the specification 

and the variety of limitations that may be included in the 

claims. Courts have found guidance in deciding whether 

the allegedly abstract idea (or other excluded category) is 

indeed known, conventional, and routine, or contains an 

inventive concept, by drawing on the rules of patentability. In Alice, the Court elaborated that, for a perceived 

abstract idea, if the claim “contains an ‘inventive concept’ 

sufficient to ‘transform’ the claimed abstract idea into a 

patent-eligible application,” 134 S. Ct. at 2357 (quoting 

Mayo, 132 S. Ct. at 1294, 1298), then the claims pass the 

test of eligibility under section 101.

II

The district court applied these principles to the IPC 

claims. The court determined that the ’505 Patent

claimed “the use of a conventional web browser Back and 

Forward navigational functionalities without data loss in 

an online application consisting of dynamically generated 

web pages.” Dist. Ct. Op. at 1269. The district court 

described “retaining information lost in the navigation of 

online forms” as an ineligible abstract idea. Id. IPC 

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INTERNET PATENTS CORPORATION v. ACTIVE NETWORK, INC. 9

argues that the “maintaining state” element of the claim

comes directly from the patent specification: 

In contrast to the prior art, the present system, in 

all its embodiments, maintains virtual application 

information, relative dependencies, and information context obtained and/or derived from each 

pane accessed by the user/applicant. This state 

maintenance enables use of standard browser 

Back and Forward button functions without loss 

of data and without losing the user's “place” in the 

application process.

’505 Patent col. 9 ll. 60-66.

In Bancorp Servs., L.L.C. v. Sun Life Assurance Co. of 

Can., 687 F.3d 1266, 1273 (Fed. Cir. 2012), the court 

observed that “claim construction is not an inviolable 

prerequisite to a validity determination under § 101.” 

However, the threshold of §101 must be crossed; an event 

often dependent on the scope and meaning of the claims.

Applying the guidance of Bilski, Mayo, and Alice to 

the present appeal, we start by ascertaining the basic 

character of the subject matter, and then whether there is 

an “inventive concept” in a claim drawn to some level of 

abstraction. Bancorp, 687 F.3d at 1273-74 (“[T]he determination of patent eligibility requires a full understanding of the basic character of the claimed subject matter.”) 

For the ’505 Patent, the end result of “maintaining the 

state” is described as the innovation over the prior art, 

and the essential, “most important aspect”: 

The most important aspect of the user interface of 

the present invention is not that it has tabs or 

that it enables a certain amount of non-sequential 

(non-linear) access to the various form sets within 

a virtual application, but that it maintains data 

state across all panes.

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10 INTERNET PATENTS CORPORATION v. ACTIVE NETWORK, INC. 

Col. 9 ll. 45-49. IPC stresses the unconventionality of the 

claim elements of maintaining the state, furnishing icons

on a web page with a browser having Back and Forward 

navigation functions, and displaying an online application 

form. IPC Supp. Br. at 9-10.

We agree with the district court that the character of 

the claimed invention is an abstract idea: the idea of 

retaining information in the navigation of online forms. 

Mayo notes the insufficiency of “well-understood, routine, 

conventional activities previously known” to found an 

“inventive concept.” 132 S. Ct. at 1298. The ’505 Patent

specification refers to the “browser Back and Forward 

button functionality” as “conventional.” Col. 3 ll. 5-10. 

The specification also refers to the Back and Forward 

functionality as “well-known” and “common,” e.g., “Furthermore, the common convenience of the ‘Back’ and 

‘Forward’ buttons (provided in all well-known Internet 

browsers) generally does not function properly when 

filling in online forms.” Col. 2 ll. 37-40.

The specification also states that the use of internet 

web pages for users to fill out online applications was 

brought about by “[t]he increasing popularity of the 

Internet and the World Wide Web,” and describes these 

online application systems as generating information to 

the user based on information inputted by the user. Col. 

1 ll. 40-60. As the district court observed, claim 1 contains no restriction on how the result is accomplished. 

The mechanism for maintaining the state is not described, 

although this is stated to be the essential innovation. The 

court concluded that the claim is directed to the idea 

itself—the abstract idea of avoiding loss of data. IPC’s 

proposed interpretation of “maintaining state” describes 

the effect or result dissociated from any method by which 

maintaining the state is accomplished upon the activation 

of an icon. Thus we affirm that claim 1 is not directed to 

patent-eligible subject matter.

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INTERNET PATENTS CORPORATION v. ACTIVE NETWORK, INC. 11

III

Independent claims 9 and 17 are identical to claim 1 

except that their preambles state “[a] computer system for 

providing an intelligent user interface to an online application, comprising computer instructions for” (claim 9)

and “[a] computer-readable storage medium, comprising 

computer instructions for” (claim 17). The statement that 

the method is performed by computer does not satisfy the 

test of “inventive concept.” Alice, 134 S. Ct. at 2360.

Claims 2 and 10 depend from claims 1 and 9, respectively, and recite identical limitations. They read:

2[/10]. The method[/computer system] of claim 

1[/9], wherein said displaying said dynamically 

generated online application form set comprises 

combining information from a template file and

either a database or a conditional merge file or 

both to form said dynamically generated online 

application form set.

Claims 7, 15, and 23 depend from claims 1, 9, and 17, 

respectively, and recite identical limitations. They read:

7[/15/23]. The method[/computer system/computer-readable storage medium] of claim 

1[/9/17], wherein said web page comprises quasistatic elements distinct from said dynamically 

generated online application form set, wherein 

said displaying said dynamically generated online 

application form set in response to the activation 

of said hyperlink affects the display of said quasistatic elements.

The additional limitations of these dependent claims do 

not add an inventive concept, for they represent merely 

generic data collection steps or siting the ineligible concept in a particular technological environment. See Alice, 

134 S. Ct. at 2357 (explaining that “‘[s]imply appending 

conventional steps, specified at a high level of generality,’ 

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12 INTERNET PATENTS CORPORATION v. ACTIVE NETWORK, INC. 

was not ‘enough’ to supply an ‘inventive concept’” (emphasis in original) (quoting Mayo, 132 S. Ct. at 1300, 1297, 

1294)); id. at 2358 (“limiting the use of an abstract idea ‘to 

a particular technological environment’” is “not enough for 

patent eligibility” (quoting Bilski, 561 U.S. at 610-11);

CyberSource, 654 F.3d at 1370 (“mere [data-gathering] 

step[s] cannot make an otherwise nonstatutory claim 

statutory”) (alterations in original) (quoting In re Grams, 

888 F.2d 835, 840 (Fed. Cir. 1989)).

The motion to dismiss addressed the dependent 

claims, arguing that they do not contain any limitations 

that make them patent-eligible. We have considered the 

arguments and conclude that the criteria of “inventive 

concept” are not met as to the dependent claims.

CONCLUSION

We affirm the district court’s ruling that the claims of 

the ’505 Patent are directed to ineligible subject matter. 

The judgment of invalidity of the ’505 Patent claims in 

terms of section 101 is affirmed. 

AFFIRMED

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