Source: http://techrights.org/2018/11/04/bieneman-at-al/
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 08:53:55+00:00

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Summary: US patent courts/judges quite consistently decline/refuse to accept software patents; so why are patent law firms still advising clients to pursue such patents — or worse — initiate litigation with such patents?
The US patent office continues to grant fake software patents that involve nothing physical, usually mere concepts. Speaking of the hospitality sector, one company called Carnival Corporation has just boasted about such patents in a press release [1, 2] soon followed by very shallow puff pieces [1, 2]; it’s a lot of Bluetooth+software, or Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) as they call it.
It’s not hard to see that when abstract patents reach actual courtrooms they typically get invalidated. Will patent lawyers deliver/dispense advice accordingly? No, they will not. Most of them will try to maintain the illusion of good odds (of winning cases) and in a later post we’ll show how they continue to name-drop Berkheimer etc.
Recent PTAB decisions on petitions for Post-Grant Review (PGR) demonstrate how little deference judges can give to patent examiners patent-eligibility decisions. Even if the USPTO in the form of a patent examiner has deemed claims patent-eligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101 and the Alice/Mayo test, the USPTO in the form of the PTAB may turn around and deem the claims unpatentable under Section 101 . Two recent cases saw the Patent Owner make the argument that it needs to make under 35 U.S.C. § 325(d), namely that the Petitioner was simply rehashing arguments already rejected by a patent examiner. These arguments were to no avail. As the PTAB receives more and more petitions for Post-Grant Review on Section 101 grounds, we may see the PTAB second-guess the examining corps regarding the patent-eligibility of more and more recently-issued patents.
Patent claims directed to pricing and cataloging products have survived a Rule 12 Motion because the court thought that there was a chance that the patent owner might be able to show a technological improvement as in McRO, Inc. v. Bandai Namco Games Am. Inc. (Fed. Cir. 2016). Vendavo, Inc. v. Price f(x), No. AG et al, 3-17-cv-06930 (N.D. Cal. Oct. 22, 2018). Regardless of whether you think the patent-eligibility test should be more or less stringently applied, you may find this decision vexing if you share my (admittedly subjective) perspective that the USPTO would not today allow these claims, and that many courts would have invalidated them under 35 U.S.C. § 101 and the Alice patent-eligibility test.
While not new, there are three points to be drawn from this case. First, courts’ applications of patent-eligibility rules remain unpredictable. Second, even though patent-eligibility and prior art invalidity are supposed to be separate questions, they are often conflated; showing novelty or non-obviousness (or a lack thereof if you are the patent owner) can be very important in prevailing on a patent-eligibility motion. Third, if you are the challenger, you have the initial burden to show that there is no technological invention – make copiously clear to the court how that burden is met.
Claims of four patents directed to using a telephone to verify a person registering for an account are invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101 and the Alice patent-eligibility test, the court held in TeleSign Corporation v. Twilio, Inc., Case No. 18-cv-03279-VC (N.D. Cal. Oct. 19, 2018). Accordingly, the court granted a Rule 12(c) motion for judgment on the pleadings that asserted claims of the four patents-in-suit were invalid under 35 U.S.C. 101. The patents are U.S. Patent Nos. 7,945,034 (“Process for determining characteristics of a telephone number”), 8,462,920, 8,687,038, and 9,300,792(each entitled “Registration, verification and notification system” and sharing a common specification).
The District of Massachusetts recently granted a motion to dismiss for ineligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101 and the Alice/Mayo test in a case involving home electrocardiogram sensors, CardioNet, LLC v. InfoBionic, Inc.—demonstrating that despite some courts’ decisions to the contrary, Rule 12 dismissals are available for ineligible subject matter notwithstanding the Federal Circuit’s decision in Berkheimer v. HP that such decisions can involve factual inquiries.
CardioNet and InfoBionic compete selling home electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors that monitor a patient’s heartbeat via the electrical activity passing through the heart muscles. In this dispute—not their first—CardioNet accuses InfoBionic’s MoMe Kardia Systems of infringing CardioNet’s U.S. Patent No. 7,941,207. The ’207 patent covers a way of detecting atrial fibrillation and atrial flutter, two types of heart arrhythmia.

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