Source: http://techrights.org/2018/11/19/demise-of-software-patents-all-levels/
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 18:03:02+00:00

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THINGS have come along pretty nicely after Alice (SCOTUS) because in light of 35 U.S.C. § 101 the courts are rejecting a lot of software patents, no matter what the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) said or still says. The law is what matters. If the USPTO grants patents which are then used to subvert justice, the USPTO will suffer in the long run.
Let’s start with some examples of recent rulings. A pro-software patents blog implicitly admits — by way of example/s — that software patents are worthless junk nowadays. They’re nearly impossible to defend. Peter Keros wrote about the Southern District of New York rejecting an asserted patent, citing § 101.
A method for analyzing text to determine a strength of an opinion is not patent-eligible subject matter under § 101. Isentium, LLC v. Bloomberg Fin. L.P., 17-cv-7601 (PKC) (S.D.N.Y. Oct. 29, 2018).
U.S. Patent No. 8,556,056 is directed to a multi-step method for evaluating statements that discuss publicly traded assets to determine whether the statement express a positive, negative, or neutral opinion (i.e., a “polarity”) and to assign a strength value to the opinion. Specifically, Plaintiff analyzed Tweets to provide information for financial professionals. The Court granted a 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss the Complaint, holding that the claims of the ‘056 patent were ineligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101.
The Central District of California recently granted, in part, a motion to dismiss based on lack of patent-eligible subject matter, under 35 U.S.C. § 101 and the Alice/Mayo test, in claims of U.S. Patent No. 8,934,535, directed to a method for data compression and decompression. Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC v. Google LLC, et al., No. CV 18-3629-GW(JCx) (C.D. Cal. Oct. 25, 2018). The court denied the motion for two other patents (U.S. Patent Nos. 9,769,477 and 7,386,046) with claims directed to system of data compression and decompression. The method claims of the ’535 patent were ineligiblebecause the patent failed to state that the claimed method would result in an increased compression speed. Concerning the’477 and ’046 patents, on the other hand, Google failed to show that the claimed systems, which included multiple compression encoders selected for use based on evaluating data, did not impart structural organization to computer processing comparable to the computer memory system in Visual Memory LLC v. NVIDIA Corp., 867 F.3d 1253, 1259 (Fed. Cir. 2017).
Going back again to the Southern District of New York, Bryan Hart wrote about another fake US patent or software patents that § 101 renders obsolete.
Personal Beasties stumbled out of the gate against Nike, with a district court invalidating Personal Beasties’ patent for ineligible subject matter on a motion to dismiss. Personal Beasties Group LLC v. Nike Inc., An animated character—even an encouraging one—did not provide enough to leap the § 101 hurdle.
In arguing for application of the Aliceabstract idea test, the defendant took a broad approach in alleging an unpatentable abstract idea: arguing “that the ’127 patent claims are directed to the abstract idea of ‘receiving, processing, and displaying or storing location information.’” The defendant argued that its motion should be decided like a Rule 12 motion in a 2016 Colorado case, Concaten, Inc. v. Ameritrack Fleet Solutions, LLC, which held patent-ineligible claims directed to providing data to assist in snow removal.
As background to the Hytera case consider this old post of ours; the ITC got involved, leaning towards the American complainant, as usual. Microsoft turned to it over a decade ago when it sought to embargo rival products (mice).
High courts continue telling/signaling to the Office that software patents are bunk, but will the officials at the Office pay attention or just ignore if not ‘diss’ the high courts?
Ancora sued HTC in the Western District of Washington alleging infringement of U.S. Patent No. 6,411,941. HTC moved to dismiss the case, contending that the claims of the patent were ineligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The District Court granted HTC’s motion. Ancora appealed to the Federal Circuit.
The ’941 patent is directed to mechanisms for preventing a computer from running unlicensed software. While using license keys to control software was well-known at the time of the patent’s earliest priority date (1998), the patent purports to do so in a rather unusual fashion (for that time).
The Court went on to disagree with the District Court, noting that the claim does recite storing the verification structure in a section of BIOS with certain beneficial characteristics, which was asserted to be an unexpected technique at the time of invention. Thus, in the view of the Federal Circuit, the claim does not recite a mere desired outcome, but how to achieve this outcome. Further, the claim addressed a technological problem associated with computers — software license verification — rather than a business, mathematical, or financial problem.
Notice that Finjan got cited. It’s relevant to this because of an exceptional high court (CAFC) judgment from the start of this year. We wrote about it several times at the start of 2018. Finjan is connected to Microsoft. This patent troll had a shareholders’ conference not so long ago. Did Microsoft give some more money to this troll any time lately? Firms (litigation pipelines would be a more suitable description) like Finjan definitely help Microsoft sell ‘protection’ and Finjan always sues Microsoft’s competition. When Microsoft joined OIN some weeks ago it kept promoting Azure as the ‘safe’ (from its patent trolls) option. “Abusix Joins Open Invention Network as Licensee” is the title of this new press release, joining the likes of many recent articles regarding OIN (this for example; it has been circulating lately). Abusix will get virtually nothing out of it, except assurance of no direct lawsuit from particular non-troll companies (except indirectly). It is worth noting that a Microsoft-connected propaganda site last week spoke about FOSS, which it is trying to wed (a shotgun wedding) to software patents.
Going back to the aforementioned HTC case, Matthew Bultman explained it as follows: “The Federal Circuit on Friday reversed a lower court ruling that a computer security patent asserted against HTC Corp. is invalid under the U.S. Supreme Court’s Alice standard, saying the patent…” (paywall hereon).
“Fed. Circ. Revives Computer Security Patent Axed Under Alice” is the headline and noteworthy is the word “revive” here; It was used by Suzanne Monyak as well as her colleague Matthew Bultman almost at the same time (“Fed. Circ. Won’t Revive Xactware Patent Challenges” was the headline). They try to insinuate that fake patents that should never have been granted in the first place got ‘killed’ or ‘murdered’ or something equally criminal.
He also took note of “Another Very Creepy Facebook Patent Application; This one killed at the PTAB with 101; Run, Don’t Walk Away from Facebook: https://e-foia.uspto.gov/Foia/RetrievePdf?system=BPAI&flNm=fd2017001718-10-22-2018-1 …” (and as we mentioned yesterday, there’s this bunch of articles with headlines like “Who lives with you? Facebook seeks to patent software to figure out profiles of households”).
What’s noteworthy in all the above is that it’s very rare nowadays for software patents to withstand 35 U.S.C. § 101, even in the face of the Berkheimer and Aatrix nonsense (or hype).
“Aatrix Expands Their Payroll Tax Reporting Offerings,” said a widely-spread new press release [1, 2]. It was published a few days ago. It’s another one of many which take note of the software patents. Aatrix has become associated with software patents predation and Aatrix the company might find it hard to dissociate from it (like Alice and Bilski).
“Apprenda sells assets for $1.55 million,” says this new headline, even though software patents are not an “asset” but an illusion thereof as they’re useless and immaterial.

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