NOTE: This disposition is nonprecedential.

 

United States Court of Appeals 

for the Federal Circuit ______________________ 

GLASSWALL SOLUTIONS LIMITED, GLASSWALL 

(IP) LIMITED,

Plaintiffs-Appellants

v.

CLEARSWIFT LTD.,

Defendant-Appellee

______________________ 

2018-1407

______________________ 

Appeal from the United States District Court for the 

Western District of Washington in No. 2:16-cv-01833-

RAJ, Judge Richard A. Jones.

______________________ 

Decided: December 20, 2018

______________________ 

ROBERT J. CARLSON, Lee & Hayes PLLC, Seattle, WA, 

argued for plaintiffs-appellants. 

 RAMSEY M. AL-SALAM, Perkins Coie, LLP, Seattle, 

WA, argued for defendant-appellee. Also represented by 

LANE M. POLOZOLA. 

 ______________________ 

Before LOURIE, LINN, and TARANTO, Circuit Judges.
2 GLASSWALL SOLUTIONS LIMITED v. CLEARSWIFT LTD. 

LINN, Circuit Judge. 

Glasswall Solutions Limited (“Glasswall”) appeals 

from the dismissal of its patent infringement suit against 

Clearswift Ltd. under Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6) for failure to 

state a claim. Because the district court did not err in 

concluding that all asserted claims of Glasswall’s U.S. 

Patent Nos. 8,869,283 and 9,516,045 are invalid as patent 

ineligible abstract ideas under 35 U.S.C. § 101, we affirm.

Applying Step 1 of Alice, the district court characterized the claims as directed to “the filtering of electronic 

files and data” by regenerating an electronic file without 

non-conforming data. Glasswall Solutions Ltd. v. 

Clearswift Ltd., No. 2:16-cv-01833, 2017 WL 5882415, at 

*4 (W.D. Wash. Nov. 29, 2017); see Alice Corp. Pty.Ltd. v. 

CLS Bank Int’l, 573 U.S. 208, 218 (2014). We agree with 

the district court’s characterization of what the claims are 

directed to and its conclusion that such filtering is abstract. The claims at issue in both patents do not purport 

to claim how the invention receives an electronic file, how

it determines the file type, how it determines allowable 

content, how it extracts all the allowable data, how it 

creates a substitute file, how it parses the content according to predetermined rules into allowable and nonconforming data, or how it determines authorization to 

receive the nonconforming data. See ’283 patent, claim 1; 

’045 patent, claim 1. Instead, the claims are framed in 

wholly functional terms, with no indication that any of 

these steps are implemented in anything but a conventional way. The use of a conventional white-list of approved application-specific functions instead of a 

conventional black-list of virus definitions does not 

change the nature of the claims. 

The claims here are similar to claims found patent ineligible in Intellectual Ventures I LLC v. Symantec Corp., 

838 F.3d 1307 (Fed. Cir. 2016). The method claims in 

Intellectual Ventures I called for receiving data, determin-
GLASSWALL SOLUTIONS LIMITED v. CLEARSWIFT LTD. 3

ing whether the received data matched certain characteristics, and outputting data based on the determining step. 

Id. at 1313. We held that the claims were “directed to 

methods of screening emails and other data files for 

unwanted content.” Id. at 1311. We concluded that this 

was an abstract idea because filtering mail (and likewise 

filtering e-mail) according to known characteristics was a

“long-prevalent practice.” Id. at 1314. Other claims 

included “inhibiting communication of at least a portion of 

the computer data from the telephone network” and 

“determining that virus screening is to be applied” based 

on the parties involved. Id. at 1319. We held that these 

claims were also abstract. 

The claims here do no more. Rather, the claims simply require “generic computer-implemented steps.” Id. at 

1318. Claim 1 of the ’283 patent requires comparing the 

file’s content to a set of rules, extracting conforming data, 

and then duplicating the conforming data (thus creating a 

substitute file). These are all generic computer functions. 

E.g. ’283 patent, col. 8, ll. 11-13 (“In this embodiment, the 

[anti-virus] application 105 is a piece of computer code, 

which is implemented using known computer programming technique.”). Claim 1 of the ’045 patent requires 

essentially the same steps, but calls for “parsing the 

content data in accordance with a predetermined data 

format” and determining nonconforming data. These 

steps are directly parallel to those in Intellectual Ventures 

I. Like in Intellectual Ventures I, the claims here deliver 

the allowable content and inhibit the communication of 

other content. The claims merely require the conventional manipulation of information by a computer. We have 

often held similar conventional data manipulation to be 

abstract. See Smart Sys. Innovations, LLC v. Chicago 

Transit Auth., 873 F.3d 1364, 1372 (Fed. Cir. 2017); Elec. 

Power Grp., LLC v. Alstom S.A., 830 F.3d 1350, 1353 

(Fed. Cir. 2016); Content Extraction & Transmission LLC 

v. Wells Fargo Bank, Nat’l Ass’n., 776 F.3d 1343, 1347 
4 GLASSWALL SOLUTIONS LIMITED v. CLEARSWIFT LTD. 

(Fed. Cir. 2014). The patents themselves indicate that 

the embodiment covering e-mail scanning is “implemented using known computer programming techniques.” ’283 

patent, col. 8, ll. 12–14; ’045 patent, col. 8, ll. 32–34. That 

the filtration here occurs by filtering in the allowable

content rather than filtering out the non-allowable content as in Intellectual Ventures I does not make the 

claimed method any less abstract.

The claims here are unlike those found patent eligible 

in Finjan, Inc. v. Blue Coat Sys., Inc., 879 F.3d 1299 (Fed. 

Cir. 2018). In Finjan, the claimed invention employed “a 

new kind of file that enables a computer security system 

to do things it could not do before.” Id. at 1305. We 

explained that the claims there, like those in Enfish, LLC 

v. Microsoft Corp., 822 F.3d 1327 (Fed. Cir. 2016), were 

directed to a “non-abstract improvement in computer 

functionality, rather than the abstract idea of computer 

security writ large.” Finjan, 879 F.3d at 1305; Enfish, 

822 F.3d at 1336. Unlike in Finjan, the claims here do 

not filter based on behavior, but based on the allowable 

form of information within a file, e.g., content other than 

I-frames in HTML or complex macros in Microsoft Word. 

Moreover, the claims do not create a new kind of file or 

improve the functioning of the computer itself. The 

“substitute” file merely duplicates the approved content 

from the original electronic file. It does not allow the 

computer to do something it could not previously do.

The claims fare no better under Alice Step 2, as they 

recite steps that do not amount to anything more than an 

instruction to apply the abstract idea of filtering nonconforming data and regenerating a file without it, plus the 

generic steps needed to implement the idea.

Finally, we find no error in the district court’s resolution of the patent ineligibility of the claims on a Rule 

12(b)(6) motion. We have approved dismissal under § 101 

on the pleadings in certain circumstances. See Content 
GLASSWALL SOLUTIONS LIMITED v. CLEARSWIFT LTD. 5

Extraction, 776 F.3d at 1349. Glasswall cannot render its 

complaint immune from dismissal by merely asserting 

that its methods are “novel” and “improve the technology 

used in electronic communications.” Dr. Leopold’s declaration of the alleged advantages in the claimed invention

also does not preclude dismissal on the pleadings. The 

alleged “factual” assertions that Glasswall points to as 

creating genuine issues of material fact are not factual in 

nature, but conclusory legal assertions which the district 

court was “not bound to accept as true.” See Bell Atl. 

Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544, 555 (2007) (quoting

Papasan v. Allain, 478 U.S. 265, 286 (1986)). 

AFFIRMED