Source: http://techrights.org/2018/11/26/htc-and-ancora-spun/
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 18:19:41+00:00

Document:
THE FINE art of cherry-picking, e.g. cherry-picking of court decisions, has been mastered by law firms looking for “marketing opportunities”. We saw that earlier this year with the Berkheimer lie and as we shall show in a moment, they’re doing it again. Their goal is to legitimise this old fiction that software patents are still worth pursuing at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and moreover suing over. Only lawyers would win. They don’t care if the patents are virtually worthless and litigation goes nowhere because they profit regardless (legal bills).
How does all this relate to the US? Well, the Federal Circuit keeps rejecting software patents, typically upon appeals emanating from Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) inter partes reviews (IPRs). The patent maximalists try hard to abolish PTAB or overcome the courts, which they frequently bash or misrepresent. They would have us believe that the Federal Circuit changed its position, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Let’s examine the past week’s news.
Patent owner Acceleration Bay, LLC (“Acceleration”) appealed the final written decisions of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board holding unpatentable claims of U.S. Patent Nos. 6,829,634; 6,701,344; and 6,714,966. Activision Blizzard, Inc., Electronic Arts Inc., Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc., 2k Sports, Inc., and Rockstar Games, Inc. (collectively, “Blizzard”) cross-appealed portions of the Board’s decisions holding that the Lin article is not a printed publication under 35 U.S.C. § 102(a), among other issues.
Here, we look at the determination of features in a “preamble” as being limitations of the claim, as well as, requirements of an article being considered a printed publication for prior art purposes.
The patents at issue are directed to a broadcast technique in which a broadcast channel overlays a point-to-point communications network. The communications network consists of a graph of point-to-point connections between host computers or “nodes,” through which the broadcast channel is implemented.
Blizzard filed six inter partes review (“IPR”) petitions—two for each of the ’344, ’966, and ’634 patents—based principally on two different prior art references: one set of IPRs challenged claims based on the Shoubridge article alone or combined with a prior art book Direct-Play (“Shoubridge IPRs”), and another set of IPRs challenged claims based on the Lin article alone or combined with DirectPlay (“Lin IPRs”).
Here, the Board found that although Lin was indexed by author and year, it was not meaningfully indexed such that an interested artisan exercising reasonable diligence would have found it, which is a proper consideration under the Federal Circuit precedent. As such, the Federal Circuit found that Lin was not a printed publication under § 102.
PTAB found these claims to be lacking novelty and thus unpatentable. It should not matter whether the prior art was printed or fully implemented or whatever; the important point is, prior art does exist. If something is not novel, then it isn’t novel, period.
We wrote about it last weekend; this should be presumed invalid, just like every other “blockchain” patent.
But sometimes marketing defies reality and logic. How about the buzzword/term “AI”?
So they (mis)use the term more than before. That means nothing at all. It’s like a fashion. “An interesting piece of work from one of the world’s largest patents law firms,” a patent maximalist called it. So they analyse a bunch of buzzwords? More so ones that have been (re)popularised in the past couple of years? What a weak hypothesis and method.
Moving on to the next example, it’s almost the end of the year and the Berkheimer lie (from back in Valentine’s Day) is still being propped up by lying lawyers looking for a buck.
To claim that Berkheimer had any meaningful effect would be patently false, but the above is just marketing anyway. Truth is not a necessity to them.
They linked to Charles Bieneman, a software patents proponent (law firm, obviously!) who belatedly wrote about Ancora Technologies, Inc. v. HTC America, Inc.
On November 16, 2018, the U.S. Court Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that a software security patent owned by Ancora Technologies, Inc. claims eligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The decision reversed a district court ruling that the patent was invalid as directed to an abstract idea. The decision establishes that patents claiming computer-related inventions directed to improving the function of a computer system by applying a specific improvement, rather than claiming only the improvement in the abstract, are patent-eligible under §101. Brooks Kushman PC represented Ancora in the Federal Circuit appeal.
On Tuesday, November 13th, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued another in a growing number of Rule 36 judgments. This particular Rule 36 patent eligibility loss for the patent owner came in Digital Media Technologies, Inc. v. Netflix, Inc., et al., and affirmed the district court’s finding that patent claims asserted by Digital Media against Netflix, Amazon and Hulu were invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101 because they were directed to an abstract idea.
The Federal Circuit panel of Circuit Judges Alan Lourie, Timothy Dyk and Todd Hughes decided to issue the Rule 36 judgment without opinion despite counsel for Digital Media contending at oral arguments that the district court did not properly administer the Alice/Mayo test when reaching a determination that the asserted patents were patent ineligible, and despite the district court admitting the pure subjective nature of determining whether a claim is directed to an abstract idea.
The patent-at-issue in this case is U.S. Patent No. 8964764, titled Multimedia Network System with Content Importation, Content Exportation, and Integrated Content Management. It claims a multimedia system that addressed various needs in the field of managing digital information in a way that makes it easy to download audio/video content from the Internet while providing reliable and flexible content protection and incorporates the use of digital video recorders (DVRs) for multiple users within a premise or vehicle.

References: § 102
 § 102
 v. 
 § 101
 §101
 v. 
 § 101