Source: https://bannerwitcoff.com/ip-alert-abstract-ideas-a-common-sense-distinction-in-electric-power-group-v-alstom/
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 15:20:39+00:00

Document:
Electric Power Group (EPG) received U.S. Patent Nos. 7,233,843; 8,060,259; and 8,401,710, in late 2000 concerning “systems and methods for performing real-time performance monitoring of an electric power grid by collecting data from multiple data sources, analyzing the data, and displaying the results.”3 EPG argued that a benefit of its invention is to provide a “humanly comprehensible” amount of information useful for users to assess the vulnerability/reliability of a power grid, but the Court did not find that argument persuasive.4 Claim 12 of U.S. Patent No. 8,401,710 appears below.
Meanwhile, in stage two of the Alice test, the Court held the claim also failed to satisfy the Alice test. The Court explained that “a large portion of the lengthy claims is devoted to enumerating types of information and information sources available within the power-grid environment…, [but this] does nothing significant to differentiate a process from ordinary mental processes [that are excluded] from the information-based category of abstract ideas.”7 The Court turned its inquiry towards “any requirements for how the desired result is achieved.”8 “Nothing in the claims, understood in light of the specification, requires anything other than off-the-shelf, conventional computer, network, and display technology,” the Court noted.9 “The claims in this case do not require a new source or type of information, or new techniques for analyzing it,… [or] an arguably inventive set of components or methods, such as measurement devices or techniques, that would generate new data.”10 Therefore, the claim fails under 35 U.S.C. § 101.
After some prefacing, the Court agreed with the district court that “one helpful way of double-checking the application of the Supreme Court’s [two-stage Alice] framework to particular claims — specifically, when determining whether the claims meet the requirement of an inventive concept in application,”11 is by “invoking an important common-sense distinction between ends sought and particular means of achieving them, between desired results (functions) and particular ways of achieving (performing) them.”12 “[T]here is a critical difference between patenting a particular concrete solution to a problem and attempting to patent the abstract idea of a solution to the problem in general,”13 the district court explained, presumably relying upon the same principle of pre-emption extolled in Alice.14 When the “claims [are] so result-focused, so functional, as to effectively cover any solution to an identified problem,” then they inhibit innovation by prohibiting others from developing their own solutions to the problem.
Click here to download the decision in Electric Power Group, LLC v. Alstom S.A.
1 See Alice Corp. Prop. Ltd. v. CLS Bank Int’l, 134 C. St. 2347, 2355 (2014).
See also Enfish, LLC v. Microsoft Corporation, No. 2015-1244 (Fed. Cir. 2016).
2 See Electric Power Group, LLC v. Alstom S.A., Appeal No. 2015-1778, slip op. at 12 (Fed. Cir., Aug. 1, 2016).
3 See id. at 2.
4 See id. at 9.
5 See id. at 6.
6 See id. at 7.
7 See id. at 9.
8 See id. (emphasis in original).
9 See id. at 10.
10 See id. at 9.
11 See id.at 12. (emphasis in original).
12 See id. at 2.
13 See id. at 11.
14 See Alice Corp. Prop. Ltd. v. CLS Bank Int’l, 110 USPQ2d 1976, 1980 (2014).

References: § 101
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