Source: https://www.lawfuel.com/blog/practical-tools-fighting-alice-using-enfish-decision/
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Practical Tools For Fighting Alice Using The Enfish Decision
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June 12, 2016 by LawFuel Editors
Lathrop & Gage – On May 12, 2016, the Federal Circuit reversed the District Court and found two software-related patents “directed to an innovative logical model for a computer database” patent eligible under 35 U.S.C. §101 [Enfish, LLC, v. Microsoft Corp. et. al., Appeal No. 2015-1244, (Fed. Cir. May 12, 2016)].
In only one case out of approximately 20 (DDR Holdings LLS v. Hotels.com), had the Federal Circuit previously found a software invention patent eligible under 35 U.S.C. §101 post-Alice. The Enfish ruling, however, emphasizes additional tools for overcoming Alice with respect to software patents. Following the Enfish decision, Deputy Commissioner for Patent Examination Policy Robert W. Bahr, in a May 19 Memorandum to the Patent Examining Corps (“Enfish Memo”), reiterated the importance of the Enfish decision and the tools it provided.
Too often, Examiners apply boilerplate §101 rejections without identifying the abstract idea. Enfishreiterates that the abstract idea asserted by Examiners during prosecution (or opposing party during litigation) must be at a level of abstraction supported by the language of the claims and cannot be too high of a level of abstraction. The latter poses the all-too-real risk of “ensur[ing] that the exceptions [i.e. abstractness] to §101 swallow the rule.”
The Enfish claims were able to avoid the “significantly more” step of the Alice test because the Court saw “no reason to conclude that all claims directed to improvements in computer-related technology, including those directed to software, are abstract.” As such, the Enfish Court’s decision now adds a new tool to overcome the first step of the Alice test by providing insight as to what exactly is an “abstract idea.”
Where previously this first step had little guidance as to the definition of an “abstract idea,” the Enfish decision now specifies that those inventions “‘purport[ing] to improve the functioning of the computer itself,’ [such as flexibility and speed] or ‘improv[ing] an existing technological process’ might not succumb to the abstract idea exception.”
This is key to avoiding the “significantly more” prong under the second step of Alice which most §101 decisions hinge upon (i.e. if the claims are directed to an abstract idea, do they amount to ‘significantly more’ than the abstract idea).
The §101 analysis is a subjective blend of what is known in the art, what is “abstract, ” and what is “significantly more.” Defining what is “conventional” may remove a subjective aspect from the §101 analysis.
And now, as shown in Enfish, comparison to conventionality in the specification can be telling evidence for overcoming a §101 rejection. The specification confirmed the Court’s analysis by defining how the invention was an improvement on the computer itself rather than mere “‘storing, organizing, and retrieving memory in a logical table’ or more simply, ‘the concept of organizing information using tabular formats.’”
The Federal Circuit specifically noted: “[t]he specification’s disparagement of conventional data structures, combined with language describing ‘the present invention’ as including the features that make up a self-referential table, confirm that our characterization of the ‘invention’ for the purposes of the §101 analysis has not been deceived by the ‘draftsman’s art.’”
Thus, the Court relied on the specification’s extensive discussion of the “conventional” prior art to support its conclusion.
The above discussed tools were applied by the Federal Circuit resulting in a finding that the Enfishclaims were patent eligible.
Applying tool #1 discussed above, the Federal Circuit urged that “the [Enfish] claims are not simply directed to any form of storing tabular data, but instead are specifically directed to a self-referentialtable for a computer database.” Applying tool #2 discussed above, the self-referential model was found to be an improvement to computer technology because the self-referential model provided “increased flexibility, faster search times, and smaller memory requirements.”
And applying tool #3 discussed above, the Court noted “our conclusion that the claims are directed to an improvement of an existing technology is bolstered by the specification’s teachings that the claimed invention achieves other benefits over conventional databases.” Thus, each of these tools were effectively used to overcome §101 in view of the Alice test.