Source: http://www.usptotalk.com/the-current-state-of-%C2%A7-101-examination-for-computer-related-inventions/
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 02:05:37+00:00

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The impact of recent § 101 changes on the patent community, particularly for computing technologies, is difficult to overstate. As the various administrative bodies seek (and fail to find) a coherent and consistent statement of the law, a distinct reality is manifesting at the point where the rubber meets the road – in day-to-day patent examination. This first post of the reconstituted USPTO Talk presents observations about the state of play in § 101 examination practice for computer-related inventions.
The Alice decision just had its three-and-half-year birthday, and the patent community is in no mood to celebrate.
Congress, bearer of the ultimate power to rewrite § 101 as it sees fit, has been preoccupied with… other matters.
The Supreme Court declined certiorari on three § 101 cases (and accepted cert in Oil States Energy Services v. Green’s Energy Group, which nominally involves § 101 as the basis for “covered business method” review, but addressed it strictly as an Article I vs. Article III courts issue).
Throughout 2015 and 2016, USPTO administration was very active in defining § 101 policy – writing and supplementing the Interim Eligibility Guidance, authoring examiner training materials, and hosting roundtables with the public. In stark contrast, the USPTO fell completely silent on the issue this year: its sole actions in 2017 have been providing summaries of recent court cases and a summary of public comments – published without any opinions expressed by the USPTO.
Given this state of affairs, the examining corps should be operating according to the most relevant and up-to-date summary of the law: the current version of the Interim Eligibility Guidance, including the memoranda updates. While some parts of it are problematic – owing to unanswerable questions created by conflicting case law – the IEG lays out a definitive framework for reaching patent-eligibility decisions and formulating rejections under 35 U.S.C. § 101 for day-to-day patent examination practice.
There’s only one problem: Examiners are not following the Interim Eligibility Guidance.
The reality: Rejections under § 101 routinely characterize claims to a specific technique based on a cherry-picked handful of words. 4 Often, the claimed techniques are generalized to the point of unrecognizability. Specific, detailed claims that involve a technique that materially improve the operation of the device are routinely dismissed as: “collecting, processing, and presenting data.” These summaries do not even reflect the point of novelty that is recited at length in the specification, and that is the focus of the claims.
The problem: To date, the Federal Circuit has issued seven precedential decisions in which computer-related technologies were found to be patent-eligible. 5 Every single one of those decisions involved, at some level, “collecting, processing, and presenting data.” In each case, the Federal Circuit went on to evaluate what that processing accomplished, and based its decision upon whether technical consequence and inventive merit were present (as in these seven instances) or lacking (Digitech Image, Electric Power Group). However, many rejections suggest that no such analysis is necessary – as if the patent-eligibility test is: do the claims involve data processing? If so, the claims are patent-ineligible… The End.
The reality: Rejections under § 101 routinely present no explanation – but a conclusory statement that the identified words (such as “collecting, analyzing, and processing data”) are abstract. Some rejections paste in a few lines of the Alice opinion. Nothing in these rejections can be considered an “explanation” by any fair meaning of that term.
The problem: The courts seem to be resolving the turmoil over § 101 by amassing collections of exemplary cases for each of the identified zones of patent-eligibility and ineligibility. However, as long as the decisions of the USPTO follow no such pattern, the patents issuing from this system – or improperly rejected – will frustrate the development of this solution.
These patterns of behavior reflect a consistent theme: The examining corps does not use the IEG as an operating manual, but merely a source of supporting material that they may choose to cite when convenient. Its requirements and descriptions of best practices have been reduced to meaningless trivialities such as generic boilerplate; its prohibitions can be ignored en masse. Moreover, examiners face no consequences for being wrong. They receive the same number of production counts and bonuses whether their decisions are affirmed or reversed at any stage. Accordingly, they have no motivation for ensuring that their rejections are well-founded – leading to incidents such as art units exhibiting a 75% reversal rate at the PTAB, with at least one examiner exhibiting a 90% reversal rate.
Examiners also exhibit such unconstrained behavior in other areas of patent examination: combining references under KSR; restriction requirements based on made-up rules and principles; “broadest reasonable interpretations” of claim language that do not even resemble the specification. 8 Collectively, these deference-laden areas of examination practice are empowering examiners to reach a personal decision to reject the application, and then fabricate obstacles that are comparatively easy to toss out – often just collections of boilerplate – and that are costly for applicants to overcome. This is not patent examination, in accordance with legal principles; this is low-effort gamesmanship, thrown up around examiners’ subjective preferences over issuing patents. It is a reversal of the prima facie burden, in which a few casual words by the examiner impose a major burden on the applicant to explain the deficiencies.

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