Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca13-15-02080/USCOURTS-ca13-15-02080-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Affinity Labs of Texas, LLC
Appellant
Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
Appellee
Amazon.com Inc.
Appellee

Document Text:

United States Court of Appeals 

for the Federal Circuit ______________________ 

AFFINITY LABS OF TEXAS, LLC,

Plaintiff-Appellant

v.

AMAZON.COM INC., 

AMAZON DIGITAL SERVICES, INC.,

Defendants-Appellees

______________________ 

2015-2080

______________________ 

Appeal from the United States District Court for the 

Western District of Texas in No. 6:15-cv-00029-WSS, 

Judge Walter S. Smith, Jr.

______________________ 

Decided: September 23, 2016

______________________ 

CYRUS ALCORN MORTON, Robins Kaplan LLP, Minneapolis, MN, argued for plaintiff-appellant. Also represented by RONALD JAMES SCHUTZ, PATRICK M. ARENZ, BRENDA 

L. JOLY, BENJAMEN LINDEN. 

J. DAVID HADDEN, Fenwick & West, LLP, Mountain 

View, CA, argued for defendants-appellees. Also represented by TODD RICHARD GREGORIAN, SAINA S. SHAMILOV;

RAVI RAGAVENDRA RANGANATH, ADAM MICHAEL LEWIN, 

San Francisco, CA; GABRIEL BELL, GREGORY G. GARRE, 

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2 AFFINITY LABS OF TEXAS, LLC v. AMAZON.COM INC. 

Latham & Watkins LLP, Washington, DC; JEFFREY H.

DEAN, Amazon.com, Inc., Seattle, WA. 

______________________ 

Before PROST, Chief Judge, BRYSON and WALLACH,

Circuit Judges.

BRYSON, Circuit Judge. 

This appeal is related to the appeal in Affinity Labs of 

Texas, LLC v. DirecTV et al., No. 2015-1845, decided 

today. Although the patents at issue in the two cases are 

different, they share a similar specification. Because the 

legal issues presented in the two cases are closely related, 

our discussion of the governing legal principles in that 

case will not be repeated here, except to the extent that 

the difference between the claims in the two cases calls 

for a somewhat different legal analysis.

I 

The patent in suit, U.S. Patent No. 8,688,085 (“the 

’085 patent”), is entitled “System and Method to Communicate Targeted Information.” The abstract describes 

the patent as directed to a “method for targeted advertising” in which an advertisement is selected for delivery to 

the user of a portable device based on at least one piece of 

demographic information about the user. 

Despite the title of the patent and the description in 

the abstract, only three sentences in the specification and 

only one of the 20 claims deal with targeted advertising.1 

 

1 The only portion of the specification that deals 

with targeted advertising reads: “A user may also provide 

demographic information allowing advertisers to access 

the demographic information and provide advertisements 

based upon the demographic information. For example, 

an advertiser may want to target Hispanic females in the 

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The rest of the specification and claims are directed to 

media systems that deliver content to a handheld wireless 

electronic device.

Claim 14 of the ’085 patent is representative2 and 

provides as follows:

A media system, comprising:

a network based media managing system that 

maintains a library of content that a given user 

has a right to access and a customized user interface page for the given user;

 

21-25 year old age group. Through providing demographic information to advertisers, when a user logs into [the 

depicted homepage] selective advertising can be ‘targeted’ 

for a group of users.” ’085 patent, col. 10, ll. 18-26. The 

only claim dealing with targeted advertising is claim 5, 

which is directed to the media system of claim 1, “further 

comprising a targeted advertising component configured 

to communicate an advertisement to the given user based 

at least in part on a demographic of the given user.”

2 The district court treated claim 14 as representative. Although Affinity has not conceded that claim 14 is 

representative of the remaining claims, it has not shown 

how independent claims 1 and 8 differ materially from 

claim 14. Moreover, while Affinity refers in passing to 

several of the dependent claims, it presents no substantive argument as to the separate patentability of those 

claims. Because Affinity has failed to present “any meaningful argument for the distinctive significance of any 

claim limitations” other than those in claim 14, Electric

Power Group, LLC v. Alstom S.A., No. 2015-1778 (Fed. 

Cir. Aug. 1, 2016), slip op. at 4, we treat claim 14 as 

representative of all the claims for purposes of this appeal.

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a collection of instructions stored in a nontransitory storage medium and configured for execution by a processor of a handheld wireless device, the collection of instructions operable when 

executed: (1) to initiate presentation of a graphical 

user interface for the network based media managing system; (2) to facilitate a user selection of 

content included in the library; and (3) to send a 

request for a streaming delivery of the content; 

and

a network based delivery resource maintaining a 

list of network locations for at least a portion of 

the content, the network based delivery resource 

configured to respond to the request by retrieving 

the portion from an appropriate network location 

and streaming a representation of the portion to 

the handheld wireless device.

Stated more succinctly, claim 14 is directed to a network-based media system with a customized user interface, in which the system delivers streaming content from 

a network-based resource upon demand to a handheld 

wireless electronic device having a graphical user interface. 

Affinity sued Amazon.com Inc. and Amazon Digital 

Services, Inc., alleging that they infringed the ’085 patent 

by marketing the Amazon Music system, which allows 

customers to stream music from a customized library. 

The Amazon entities moved for the entry of judgment on 

the pleadings, arguing that the asserted claims were not 

directed to patentable subject matter.

The magistrate judge recommended that judgment be 

entered in the Amazon entities’ favor. Following the twostage inquiry for patent eligibility set forth by the Supreme Court in Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc., 132 S. Ct. 1289 (2012), and Alice 

Corp. v. CLS Bank International, 134 S. Ct. 2347 (2014), 

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the magistrate judge found that the ’085 patent is directed to an abstract idea—“delivering selectable media 

content and subsequently playing the selected content on 

a portable device.” 

Turning to the next step of the eligibility analysis, the 

magistrate judge found that the claims of the ’085 patent 

do not contain an “inventive concept.” Instead, he concluded, the claims are directed to applying the abstract 

idea “to the Internet and a generic, electronic device—in 

this case, a wireless handheld device operating as a 

‘ubiquitous information-transmitting medium, not a novel 

machine’” (citing Ultramercial, Inc. v. Hulu, LLC, 772 

F.3d 709, 716-17 (Fed. Cir. 2014)). The magistrate judge 

also found that the components recited in the claims are

generic. He explained that the “network based media 

managing system” is a generic database and that the 

“non-transitory storage medium” could be any kind of 

memory. 

The magistrate judge rejected Affinity’s argument 

that the customized user interface supplies the inventive 

concept to the claimed invention. The user interface 

limitation, the magistrate judge explained, does not 

identify “any specific technology or instructions that 

explain how the device can do what it purports to do or 

direct the practitioner how to carry out the claims.” 

The district court agreed with the magistrate judge’s 

recommendation and entered judgment against Affinity. 

The court agreed with the magistrate judge that the ’085

patent claims are directed to the abstract idea of “delivering selectable media content and subsequently playing 

the selected content on a portable device.” The court also 

agreed that the claims do not supply an inventive concept 

as “[t]he ’085 Patent solves no problems, includes no 

implementation software, designs no system. The mere 

statement that the method is performed by computer does 

not satisfy the test of inventive concept.” 

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II

A 

We begin by addressing the first step of the 

Mayo/Alice inquiry: whether the claims of the ’085 patent 

are directed to an “abstract idea.” Like the district court, 

we hold that the concept of delivering user-selected media 

content to portable devices is an abstract idea, as that 

term is used in the section 101 context. 

The district court’s conclusion is consistent with our 

approach to the “abstract idea” step in prior cases. For 

example, In re TLI Communications LLC Patent Litigation, 823 F.3d 607 (Fed. Cir. 2016), involved a patent on a 

method for uploading digital images from a cellular 

telephone to a server, which would then classify and store 

the images. 

Although the claim at issue in that case recited physical components such as a telephone unit and a server, the 

court noted that “not every claim that recites concrete, 

tangible components escapes the reach of the abstractidea inquiry,” and it pointed out that the specification 

made clear that the recited physical components “merely 

provide a generic environment in which to carry out the 

abstract idea of classifying and storing digital images in 

an organized manner.” Id. at 611. The court added that 

“the specification’s emphasis that the present invention 

‘relates to a method for recording, communicating and 

administering [a] digital image’ underscores that [the 

claim at issue] is directed to an abstract concept.” Id. 

The TLI court concluded that, as in this case, the claims 

were directed to “the use of conventional or generic technology in a nascent but well-known environment, without 

any claim that the invention reflects an inventive solution 

to any problem presented by combining the two.” Id. at 

612. 

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Similarly, in Ultramercial, Inc. v. Hulu, LLC, 772 

F.3d 709 (Fed. Cir. 2014), we found the process of allowing a consumer to receive copyrighted media in exchange 

for watching a selected advertisement was an abstract 

idea. The idea in this case is even broader and more 

abstract than the idea in Ultramercial: The ’085 patent 

covers streaming content generally, not even including an 

additional feature such as exchanging the consumer’s 

access to the streaming content for the consumer’s viewing of an advertisement.

Affinity contends that the ’085 patent embodied a concrete technological innovation because, as of its priority 

date (March 28, 2000), wireless streaming of media was 

not “routine, conventional, or well-known.” The patent, 

however, does not disclose any particular mechanism for 

wirelessly streaming content to a handheld device. The 

specification describes the function of streaming content 

to a wireless device, but not a specific means for performing that function. Claim 14, in turn, recites (1) a “media 

managing system” that maintains a library of content, (2)

a “collection of instructions” that are “operable when 

executed” by a handheld wireless device to request 

streaming delivery of the content, and (3) a “network 

based delivery resource” that retrieves and streams the 

requested content to the handheld device. At that level of 

generality, the claims do no more than describe a desired 

function or outcome, without providing any limiting detail 

that confines the claim to a particular solution to an 

identified problem. The purely functional nature of the 

claim confirms that it is directed to an abstract idea, not 

to a concrete embodiment of that idea. See Elec. Power 

Grp., LLC v. Alstom S.A., No. 2015-1778, slip op. 12 

(“[T]he essentially result-focused, functional character of 

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claim language has been a frequent feature of claims held 

ineligible under § 101.”).3

In addressing the first step of the section 101 inquiry, 

as applied to a computer-implemented invention, it is 

often helpful to ask whether the claims are directed to “an 

improvement in the functioning of a computer,” or merely 

“adding conventional computer components to well-known 

business practices.” Enfish, LLC v. Microsoft Corp., 822 

F.3d 1327, 1338 (Fed. Cir. 2016). The claims of the ’085 

patent fall into the latter category.

Affinity contends that the magistrate judge improperly engaged in fact-finding when he stated that the idea of 

delivering media content to a wireless portable device is 

one of long standing. It is not debatable, however, that 

the delivery of media content to electronic devices was 

well known long before the priority date of the ’085 patent, and Affinity does not argue otherwise. The magistrate judge cited transistor radios and portable televisions 

as commonplace examples of the delivery of audio media 

to portable electronic devices. An example of technology 

that is even closer to the idea underlying the ’085 patent 

is the delivery of selectable prerecorded messages to 

callers on demand in services such as dial-a-prayer and 

dial-a-joke, which were available long before the invention 

of cellular telephones or the Internet.

 

3 Affinity argues that the district court erred in disregarding the statement of its expert that streaming 

content to a portable device was novel as of the priority 

date of the ’085 patent. But the eligibility finding does 

not turn on the lack of novelty of the claim; it turns on the 

fact that the claim is drawn to any embodiment of an

abstract idea. The district court therefore properly disregarded the expert’s statement.

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While Affinity criticizes the magistrate’s making factual findings on a motion for judgment on the pleadings, 

the practice of taking note of fundamental economic 

concepts and technological developments in this context is 

well supported by our precedents. See, e.g., OIP Techs., 

Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc., 788 F.3d 1359, 1362-63 (Fed. 

Cir. 2015) (affirming district court’s finding on a motion to 

dismiss that “offer-based price optimization” is a fundamental economic concept and that the claimed computerbased implementation of that idea is routine and conventional); Content Extraction & Transmission LLC v. Wells 

Fargo Bank, Nat’l Ass’n, 776 F.3d 1343, 1347 (Fed. Cir. 

2014) (affirming district court’s finding on a motion to 

dismiss that the claims were directed to the well-known 

abstract idea of “1) collecting data, 2) recognizing certain 

data within the collected data set, and 3) storing that 

recognized data in a memory”). 

Affinity also objects to the magistrate judge’s conclusion that the claims merely set forth “routine and generic 

processing and storing capabilities of computers generally.” Yet the claim terms to which the magistrate judge 

referred, such as a “network based media management 

system” and a “graphical user interface,” are simply 

generic descriptions of well-known computer components. 

See In re TLI Commc’ns LLC Patent Litig., 823 F.3d at

611 (physical components such as a telephone and a 

server “merely provide a generic environment in which to 

carry out the abstract idea”); Mortg. Grader, Inc. v. First 

Choice Loan Servs. Inc., 811 F.3d 1314, 1324-25 (Fed. Cir. 

2016) (claims reciting an “interface,” “network,” and 

“database” are directed to an abstract idea). Affinity 

makes no claim that it invented any of those components 

or their basic functions, nor does it suggest that those 

components, at that level of generality, were unknown in 

the art as of the priority date of the ’085 patent.

In an effort to show that claim 14 is not directed to an 

abstract idea, Affinity focuses in particular on the recitaCase: 15-2080 Document: 54-2 Page: 9 Filed: 09/23/2016
10 AFFINITY LABS OF TEXAS, LLC v. AMAZON.COM INC. 

tion of a “customized user interface” in that claim. For 

support, Affinity cites passages in the specification that 

describe embodiments in which a user may elect to have a 

customized interface such as a radio dial, a playlist, or 

targeted advertising based on demographic information 

provided by the user. See ’085 patent, col. 10, ll. 10-26; 

col. 11, ll. 5-35. This court, however, has held that “customizing information based on . . . information known 

about the user” is an abstract idea. Intellectual Ventures I 

LLC v. Capital One Bank (USA), 792 F.3d 1363, 1369 

(Fed. Cir. 2015). The court in the Intellectual Ventures I 

case explained that tailoring of content based on information about the user—such as where the user lives or 

what time of day the user views the content—is an abstract idea that is as old as providing different newspaper 

inserts for different neighborhoods. Id.

The term “customized user interface,” as used in the 

’085 patent, is not limited to any particular form of customization, but covers the general idea of customizing a

user interface. Like the basic concept of tailoring content 

to a user, as in Intellectual Ventures I, the basic concept of 

customizing a user interface is an abstract idea. 

B 

Turning to the second step of the Mayo/Alice inquiry,

we conclude that there is nothing in the claims or the 

specification of the ’085 patent that constitutes a concrete 

implementation of the abstract idea in the form of an 

“inventive concept.” Alice, 134 S. Ct. at 2355; Mayo, 132 

S. Ct. at 1294. 

As noted, representative claim 14 is written in largely

functional terms, claiming “a collection of instructions” 

that perform the functions of displaying a selection of 

available content on a graphical user interface and allowing the user to request streaming of that content. The 

claims thus do not go beyond “stating [the relevant]

functions in general terms, without limiting them to 

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technical means for performing the functions that are 

arguably an advance over conventional computer and 

network technology.” Elec. Power Grp., slip op. at 2.

Features such as network streaming and a customized user interface do not convert the abstract idea of 

delivering media content to a handheld electronic device 

into a concrete solution to a problem. The features set 

forth in the claims are described and claimed generically

rather than with the specificity necessary to show how 

those components provide a concrete solution to the 

problem addressed by the patent.

In particular, claim 14 requires a “network based delivery resource,” but that does not make the claim a 

patent-eligible implementation of an abstract idea. The 

specification makes clear that any technology capable of 

wireless communication of audio information to the device 

would be covered. See ’085 patent, col. 4, ll. 41-45 (“The 

present invention advantageously allows for several 

different embodiments of wirelessly communicating 

selected audio information to [an] electronic device 

. . . and is not limited to any specific configuration described below.”).

The only putatively narrowing limitation in that result-focused claim is the limitation requiring that the 

“network based media managing system” have “a customized user interface page for the given user.” But neither 

the claim nor the specification reveals any concrete way of 

employing a customized user interface. The specification 

simply states that a user interface can be customized “in a 

plurality of ways” by allowing users to select and receive 

“on-demand customized audio information.” Id., col. 16, 

ll. 21-22, 25-26. That disclosure and the accompanying 

“customized user interface” limitation in the claim do not 

constitute a concrete application of the abstract idea of 

delivering content to a wireless device and thus do not 

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12 AFFINITY LABS OF TEXAS, LLC v. AMAZON.COM INC. 

embody an “inventive concept,” as that term has been 

used in the Mayo/Alice line of cases.

In sum, the patent in this case is not directed to the 

solution of a “technological problem,” Alice, 134 S. Ct. at 

2358, nor is it directed to an improvement in computer or 

network functionality, see In re TLI Commc’ns LLC Patent 

Litig., 823 F.3d at 612. It claims the general concept of 

streaming user-selected content to a portable device. The 

addition of basic user customization features to the interface does not alter the abstract nature of the claims and 

does not add an inventive component that renders the 

claims patentable. We therefore uphold the district 

court’s judgment that the claims of the ’085 patent are not 

eligible for patenting.

AFFIRMED

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