Source: https://www.bilskiblog.com/laws-of-nature/
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 22:41:33+00:00

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In Ameritox v. Millenium Health (W.D. Wis., J. Conley) the court rejected the defendant's motion to reconsider its earlier ruling that Ameritox's patents were not ineligible. (The earlier decision cited my Law360 article, noting that only 26% of patents have survived post-Alice motions.) Here, Millenium argued that the court should not have considered that "the prior art steered a skilled artisan away" from the claimed invention, and that one of the claimed steps was not conventional, since this allegedly conflated eligibility with novelty and non-obviousness. The court ripped Millenium on this point, saying "this argument ignores that Millenium itself squarely argues the relevant relevance of this factor in assessing the eligibility of the ’680 patent under § 101, by citing the Federal Circuit's decisions in In re BRCA1- and BRCA2- Based Hereditary Cancer Test Patent Litigation, where the court specifically held that "what practitioners already knew" and what were "well-understood, routine, and conventional techniques that a scientist would have thought of" were relevant to eligibility.
This is, in my view, the right approach. Several recent district court decisions have said that evidence of novelty is not relevant to eligibility, and cited Diehr's statement that "the "novelty" of any element or steps in a process, or even of the process itself, is of no relevance in determining whether the subject matter of a claim falls within the § 101 categories of possibly patentable subject matter." This interpretation utterly misreads Diehr: the Court was discussing claim dissection, emphasizing that "it is inappropriate to dissect the claims into old and new elements and then to ignore the presence of the old elements in the analysis." The Court was criticizing the approach of disregarding "old elements" that lack novelty from the the claim for the purposes of eligibility–not saying that actual novelty was irrelevant.
Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, 573 U.S. __, 134 S. Ct. 2347, 2352 (2014) (citations omitted).
[W]e do not purport to state that all claims in all software-based patents will necessarily be directed to an abstract idea. Future cases may turn out differently.
2014 U.S. App. LEXIS, at *11.
This phrasing is precisely how one would state an exception to a rule. Instead of saying that software is generally not directed to abstract ideas, and that in some cases may be, this phrasing implies the opposite: software is presumed to be an abstract idea (hence ineligible) though there may be some case in the future in which it is not. This approach turns the entire patent eligibility framework on its head. This essay explores how Ultramercial III reaches this inversion and its potential consequences.
Analysis of Preliminary Examination Instructions in View of the Supreme Court Decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank.
On June 25, 2014, just six days after the Supreme Court decided Alice Corp. Pty. Ltd. v. CLS Bank Int’l, 134 S. Ct. 2347 (2014), the USPTO issued its Preliminary Examination Instructions (“Guidance”) in view of the case. Subsequently, the Office asked for public comments on the Guidance. Over forty companies, associations, law firms and individuals submitted comments, including myself. This series of posts is based on the comments I submitted to the Office.
In my view, the Guidance does not correctly interpret the Supreme Court’s decision, and does not provide specific guidance to the 7,000 examiners who will have to implement them on a daily basis. The Court’s decision was not written as a manual for how examiners are to evaluate patent applications, and so simply quoting and paraphrasing the decision (along with scrupulous footnoting) is not sufficient to provide a cohesive, workable framework for the examination of patent applications, particularly for computer implemented inventions. The core problem remains that examiners will be left to their own subjective evaluation and opinion of the patent eligibility of the claims before them. Already, the patent community is observing very different approaches from different examiners. This lack of uniformity leads to increased costs and delays in the examination of patents, as well as increased uncertainty by innovators as to the eligibility of their inventions in technologies that have been traditionally considered patent eligible.
On January 31, 2014, Fenwick & West and the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property (CPIP) at George Mason University School of Law held a roundtable on Patentable Subject Matter at Fenwick’s Silicon Valley office.
You are heading to Grandma’s house for yet another family gathering. Upon entering the front door, you are belted by a thunderclap of the smells of mothballs, yellowed plastic sofa covers, cat hair and foot powder. As you regain your bearings, the mellifluous under notes of Grandma’s apple pie reach you: tiny, moist, fragrant, individually encapsulated particles of Granny Smiths, butter and sugar, all borne upon the dry, hard air like foam upon breaking waves. You beeline to the kitchen, bypassing the hubbub of family, friends and distant cousins congregating in the living room.

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