Source: https://www.patentdocs.org/2018/03/index.html
Timestamp: 2020-08-04 08:58:12
Document Index: 380386154

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 101', '§ 101', '§ 101', '§ 101', '§ 101', '§ 101', '§ 101', '§ 314', '§ 314', '§ 325', '§ 325', '§ 112', '§ 314', '§ 316', '§ 101', '§ 101']

Patent Docs: March 2018
Strafford will be offering a webinar entitled "Overcoming § 101 Rejections for Computer and Electronics Related Patents -- Leveraging USPTO Guidance and Recent Decisions to Meet 101 Patent Eligibility Requirements" on April 19, 2018 from 1:00 to 2:30 pm EDT. Charles Bieneman of Bejin Bieneman and Michael P. Shepherd of Fish & Richardson will guide patent counsel for overcoming § 101 rejections for computer and electronics related patents, and review recent case law and USPTO guidance on § 101 patent eligibility and offer strategies to address § 101 rejections. The webinar will review the following issues:
• What are the significant recent § 101 decisions at the Federal Circuit, the district courts and PTAB?
• How can specifications and claims be drafted to guard against § 101 rejections?
• What strategies and arguments can be used in patent prosecution to overcome § 101 rejections?
American Conference Institute (ACI) will be holding its 12th Annual Paragraph IV Disputes conference on April 23-24, 2018 in New York, NY. ACI faculty will provide insights into:
• Understanding the correlation between Paragraph IV filings and the speed of ANDA approvals
• Reviewing recent Federal Circuit rulings and District Court interpretations of TC Heartland, and their impact on venue
• Exploring Oil States vs. Greene's Energy Group and the constitutionality of IPR proceedings
• Examining the impact of the Sovereign immunity defense and the status of a Congressional response
• The interplay between the new FDA leadership and Hatch-Waxman litigation
• Recent PTAB decisions and appeals in the pharmaceutical practice group
• Deciphering recent Federal Circuit opinions addressing obviousness in the ANDA setting
• Reviewing the state of the law on induced infringement for Hatch-Waxman cases
• Evaluating typical ethical predicaments that may arise in Paragraph IV litigation
• Paragraph IV Litigation Year in Review: Present Developments and Future Forecasts
• The Evolving Principles of Venue and Jurisdiction in the Aftermath of TC Heartland
• IPR Update: Oil States, SAS and the Future of IPRs: An Assessment of Challenges to Inter Partes Review Presently before the Supreme Court
• IPR Update: The Question of Sovereign Immunity: A Legitimate Means of Pharmaceutical Patent Protection?
• The Distinctive Roles of The Magistrate Judge and Local Counsel in Paragraph IV Proceedings
• View From the Bench: The Federal Judges Speak on Paragraph IV Litigation
• The Impact of New FDA Leadership on Hatch-Waxman Practice
• PTAB Update: Wins, Losses and Appeals
• Fireside Chat with the PTAB: Thoughts on Practice, Procedure, IPRs and Other Meanderings in the World of Pharmaceutical Patent Validity Challenges
• Obviousness Update for PIV Litigation: Matters of Inherency, Anticipation and Secondary Considerations
• The Devil in the Label Details: A New Test for Induced Infringement
• Ethics: Case Studies in Ethical Developments Influencing Paragraph IV Practice
In addition, two post-conference workshops will be offered on April 25, 2018. The first, entitled "Jurisdiction and Venue Selection Master Class" will be offered from 8:30 am to 12:00 pm, and the second, entitled "Biosimilar Litigation Boot Camp for the Hatch-Waxman Litigator" will be offered from 1:00 to 4:30 pm.
Patent Docs is a media partner of ACI's 12th Annual Paragraph IV Disputes Conference.
Putting on Your Best Face: Expanded PTAB Panels in IPRs and Other PTO Proceedings
There has been a great deal of angst generated by the practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) of expanding panels from the customary three Administrative Patent Judges to include additional APJ's, including the Chief Judge and his deputies. This practice was identified, seemingly by accident, during oral argument in Yissum Research Development Co. v. Sony Corp.; there, it became evident that the USPTO administration can and had intervened to alter or expand panels. This practice has raised concerns regarding whether the PTAB is observing the procedural niceties that ensure due process will be satisfied. This happened most recently in Ericsson v. Regents of the University of Minnesota and LSI Logic v. Regents of the University of Minnesota, which some commentators have noted are strikingly similar, and the practice has raised judicial eyebrows at the Supreme Court as well as the Federal Circuit. The most recent donnybrook has involved production of redacted e-mails and other documents requested by counsel and obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request relating to the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe's assertion (unsuccessful, so far) tribal sovereign immunity to avoid Final Written Decision in a series of inter partes review proceedings initiated prior to transfer of patent rights from drugmaker Allergan to the tribe.
In an effort to improve the optics of the situation, a March 13, 2018 "Chat with the Chief (Judge)" program, featuring David P. Ruschke, Chief Patent Judge, joined by Michelle N. Ankenbrand, Lead Administrative Patent Judge, addressed the issue by discussing a study of the use of expanded panels in IPR and other proceedings before the PTAB. The program started with the assertion that the Chief Judge has the authority (albeit not citing the statutory basis therefor), to expand panels but moderated that statement by emphasizing that expanded panels are "rare" and "ordinarily not used." Expanded panels, when they are used are used for two purposes. According to these officials. First, the panels are used when the Board is considering "issues of exceptional importance," which the Judge's PowerPoint slide characterized as "guidance." Second (and perhaps more controversially), expanded panels are used to maintain uniformity (termed "consistency") in PTAB (USPTO, actually) policy decisions. The Chief Judge explained that an expanded panel requires a written request to the Commissioner of Patents or his delegate (who?); the request can come from an APJ, a merits or interlocutory panel, a patent owner or applicant in ex parte matters, or the parties in inter partes reexamination, interference, or "AIA trial." The request must also contain reasons for expanded panel consideration; this can, again with some controversy, relate to an issue of first impression or "governed by a prior Board decision where Commissioner has determined it would not be in the public interest to follow the prior Board decision" (emphasis added). Acceptable justifications or rationales include:
• Predictable and uniform application of agency policy
• Similarly situated parties, under the same facts, are treated the same
• Notice to the public
In practice, when expanded panels are employed, it is preferred that the panel include the Chief and a Deputy; include in the decision an explanation of the reason for expanding the panel; and preferably the expanded panel does not change the result arrived at by the original panel. In view of these rationales, decisions from expanded panels are expected to be designated either as informative or precedential.
The study described by the Chief Judge involved four questions: 1) how frequent were expanded panels convened? 2) under what circumstances? 3) what was the reasoning behind expanding the panel? and 4) what was the result? The study considered 7,390 petitions filed before December 31, 2017, involving 6,033 institution decisions, 1,912 Final Written Decisions (FWDs), and "thousands" of interlocutory orders. Expanded panel decisions were assessed "manually" and excluded families where expanded panels were used to conserve resources (multiple consolidated cases).
Regarding the first question, the statistics showed 23 expanded panels of 6,033 institution decisions; 31 expanded panels of thousands of interlocutory orders; no expanded panels in 1,912 FWDs; and 5 expanded panels involving decisions in multiple consolidated IPRs.
Expanded panels when they arose were empaneled to make a decision on the merits 80% of the time and on request for rehearing in the other 20%.
Data on the rationales for expanded panels were explicated in more detail.
There were 21 instances where the panel was expanded at institution to consider questions of statutory interpretation.
• § 314(a) Multiple Petitions: General Plastic v. Canon, Case IPR2016-01357, -01358, -01359, -01360, -01361 (PTAB Sept. 6, 2017) (Paper 19) (precedential) (vote from 3-0 to 7-0 with expansion on rehearing)
– Emphasizes the factors that the Board considers in deciding whether to exercise its discretion to deny a follow-on Petition in an AIA proceeding under 35 U.S.C. § 314(a).
• § 325(d) Similar Art/Arguments: Neil Ziegmann v. Carlis G. Stephens, Case IPR2015-01860 (PTAB Sept. 6, 2017) (Paper 13) (vote from 3-0 to 5-0 with expansion on rehearing)
– Emphasizes that prior art or arguments may be considered "substantially the same" under 35 U.S.C. § 325(d) if they are "cumulative to or substantially overlap with issues previously considered by the Office with respect to the patent."
• CBM Pre-Institution Disclaimer: Facebook v. Skky, Case CBM2016-00091 (PTAB Sept. 28, 2017) (Paper 12) (precedential) (vote from 3-0 to 5-0 with expansion on rehearing)
– Emphasizes that CBM patent review eligibility is determined based on the claims of the challenged patent as they exist at the time of the decision to institute, and that statutorily disclaimed claims must be treated as if they never existed for the purpose of institution.
Five instances arose at institution decision for questions of petition requirements.
Four occurred on motion procedure.
Twelve involved decisions to impose sanctions.
Seven involved questions of sovereign immunity; and ten were at the request of the PTAB panel. In these ten cases, HTC America v. Virginia Innovation Sciences, Case IPR2017-00870, -00871, -00872, -00873, -00874, -00875, -00876, -00877, -00878, -00879 (PTAB Sept. 13, 2017), the original panel suggested expansion to maintain uniformity due to substantial difference of opinion among the judges on a group of 10 related cases regarding an issue arising under 35 U.S.C. § 112(f).
With regard to the fourth question, the Chief Judge contended that the expanded panel came to the same conclusion as the original panel, with the exception of Target Corp. v. Destination Maternity Corp. (IPR2014-00508), and Nidec Motor Co. v. Zhongshan Broad Ocean Motor Co., No. 2016-2321, slip op. (Fed. Cir. Aug. 22, 2017).
The Chief provided these conclusions:
• Expanded panels are very rare
• Most expanded panel decisions issued as original decisions, not decisions on rehearing
• Panels were expanded for guidance and consistency:
• to provide forward-looking guidance on reoccurring issues; and/or
• to treat similarly situated parties the same
• Underlying result remained the same after panel expansion on rehearing, except for Target and Nidec, both of which address same-party joinder
Article I courts, and the PTAB in particular, have a legitimate goal: providing consistent application of the law to applicants and, in the case of implementing the adversarial avenues the AIA created, developing a consistent body of procedural and substantive law. To this end, for example, the PTAB has designated some (albeit few) cases precedential, thus providing notice to the public regarding how the Office can be expected to conduct the "trials" mandated by the statute. But the manner in which the Board has attempted to provide this consistency, in particular with regard to expanded panels in post-grant review proceedings, has provoked sufficient controversy that Chief Judge Ruschke felt it necessary (or at least politically expedient) to requisition a study and include the results in his "chat." The kerfuffle that has arisen over expanded PTAB panels is the direct result of the chimerical nature of the proceedings engendered by the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act. Characterized as "trials" in the rhetoric used to obtain passage of the Act, the various post-grant review instruments are more in the nature of "a specialized agency proceeding" as the Supreme Court noted in Cuozzo Speed Technologies v. Lee. Seen in this light the practice of expanding panels to ensure consistency of agency action would appear to have some merit. Seen as a trial, however, the overriding consideration is due process, wherein a patentee cannot be deprived of her property except in an adjudicatory proceeding where she has a fair opportunity to be heard without the deck stacked against her. The Office has been zealous in putting patents of purportedly dubious validity through the gauntlet of post-grant review. To many, the Board needs to be just as zealous in ensuring that patentees be deprived of their patent properties only if due process is followed as rigorously in the Office as it is in district court. It may be impossible to reconcile these two diverse mistresses intertwined in post-grant review, but if the Office does not, cannot, or will not, eventually the Supreme Court will.
Posted at 10:23 PM in Patent Trial and Appeal Board, Post-Grant Proceedings | Permalink | Comments (15)
Posted at 08:56 PM in Federal Circuit, Patent Trial and Appeal Board, Post-Grant Proceedings | Permalink | Comments (6)
What You Can Do to Prevent Multiple Petitions (or How You Can Successfully File One) -- Part I: The PTAB's "Multiple Petition Study"
By George "Trey" Lyons, III --
As an endcap to a recent webinar Andrew Williams and I did on the most important PTAB stories from the past year, I addressed the effects that multiple, often serial, petitions can have on patent owners and their patents, and what can be done to alleviate some of the associated stresses -- or increase them if you're the petitioner. See Top Stories at the PTAB: What You Need to Know (Mar. 13, 2018), available here. As final topics often go, however, my coverage was constrainedly brief. So, here I will unpack the analysis patent owners and petitioners, alike, should keep top-of-mind when moving through this strategy.
To frame this issue, for PTAB petitioners who pay no attention to sunk-cost fallacies, the idea of throwing good money after a bad petition (e.g., those filed by another petitioner, based on different art and/or arguments) may always seem like the most aggressive and effective option at your disposal. From the point of view of the patent owner, the anxiety of finding yourself as the recipient of a multiple petition barrage crying for the revocation of your hard-earned patent rights is often real, and may even seem fundamentally unfair.
Understanding this concern, late last year the PTAB undertook a comprehensive study to look at just how many patents have actually faced multiple petitions, who filed them, when they were filed, and how effective they were, both in terms of institution rate and the number of challenged patents that were ultimately lost (in whole or part). See Multiple Petitions Study (Oct. 24, 2017), available here. Because both the ultimate message (i.e., "Fear not, multiple petitions are really not that big of a threat") and the delivery (e.g., fairly confusing metrics, etc.) felt a little unsettling, a few key aspects of the study are likely worth further explication.
In the study, the PTAB reviewed 7,168 petitions addressing 4,376 patents. From this, taking a "just the facts" approach where we can, some of the more important statistics presented in the study were as follows:
Who's Filing: 84.8% of patents were challenged by a single petitioner, and 94.5% faced two or fewer.
What's Being Filed: 67% of patents are challenged by one petition, 20.2% of patents are challenged by two petitions, and the numbers fall off quickly from there.
When Are They Filed: Next, in slightly different approach, the PTAB examined when all of these petitions were actually filed. The presentation, however, may have been a little misleading considering the topic at hand -- the impact of multiple petitions on post-grant proceedings. The PTAB's graph below indicates that 79% of petitions are filed before the patent owner preliminary response or institution decision, 95% of petitions are filed in a given petitioner's first round (before any institution decision), and only 5% of petitions are filed after a patent owner preliminary response, but before institution decision.
The slightly confusing part of this graph, however, is that some might interpret it on first impression as applying only to multiple petitions. Not so. Instead, the 41% (seen here in purple) included in the PTAB-touted "79% of Petitions" being filed without the benefit of seeing a patent owner preliminary response or institution decision are actually instances in which only one petition was ever filed. But, if you are more interested in the more pressing question seemingly at the center of the study -- when multiple petitions were filed -- the percentage of "wait-and-see" petitioners are actually much more substantial. Specifically, normalizing these percentages over the number multiple petitions filed, the impact looks more like this: 64.4% of multiple petitions were filed on or near the same day, 8.4% were filed after the patent owner preliminary response, and 27.19% were filed after the decision institution. Thus, if you're going to be filing (or facing) multiple petitions, the "wait-and-see" strategy seems to be alive and well.
Finally, perhaps not surprisingly at this point, the Board also found that instances of any further, subsequent rounds of petitions past a second round were statistically insignificant (less than 0.1%, and where a "round" is all petitions filed before receiving a decision institution on one of those petitions). Considering the typical timeline from filing to institution decision in light of the statutory time bar for filing, the PTAB really only confirmed that there are, statistically, very few instances in which multiple full rounds of petitions were filed.
Based on these figures, it would seem that some of the biggest challenges for patent owners who consider these petitions (and PTAB proceedings generally) as "death marches" for their hard-earned property rights (e.g., facing more than one petitioner, facing more than two petitions) are not, statistically, as relevant as some may have thought; but facing the ever-dreaded (and often effective) "wait-and-see" petitioners may well be.
The impact articulated by the PTAB that these petitions actually have on the challenged patent was also very surprising -- although a little difficult to appreciate in the graphs presented below.
Multiple Petition Effect on Institution Decision:
First, the PTAB noted that although institution rates have decreased, the effect that multiple petitions have on those ultimate institution rates is marginal (70% versus 64% in 2017), but has increased slightly (4% in 2013 to 7% in 2016). To help cut through these figures, the blue line below indicates a measure of the institution rate by patent, which is agnostic of how many petitions were actually filed against the patent (e.g., two petitions filed against a patent, one gets instituted, one does not = 100% institution rate). The green line, on the other hand, indicates a measure of the institution rate by petition, which is an outcome averaged by how many petitions were actually filed against the patent (e.g., two petitions filed against a patent, one gets instituted, one does not = 50% institution rate).
Thus, as you can see, although the overall institution rate in post-grant proceedings has decreased over the past four years, the impact of filing multiple petitions has increased slightly (note, the figures for 2017 only include analysis for the first half of the year). Even so, the PTAB's answer to biggest question left on everyone's lips -- "What will this process ultimately mean for my patent (or the one I'm challenging)?" -- was perhaps the most surprising of all.
Multiple Petition Effect on Ultimate Outcome of the Challenged Patent:
Turning to this answer, it is clear that the real effect of multiple petitions is most naturally viewed by considering how these same variables affect the ultimate outcome of the trial[s] and how the patent itself actually changed by going through it [them]. In the graph below, once again the blue and green coloration reflects the scenarios above, which indicate that 69% of all petitions result in a patent being unchanged and 58% of patents are completely unchanged at the end of one or more AIA proceedings. Furthermore, the PTAB's figures also indicate that multiple petitions are slightly more beneficial for challenging some claims as unpatentable, as opposed to all claims as unpatentable. Regardless, from the PTAB's view, the impact of multiple petitions in post-grant proceedings on the number of challenged patents that were ultimately lost (in whole or part) does not seem as great as some people feared.
Bringing all of this back home, although somewhat hard to believe the results of the PTAB's "Multiple Petition Study" seem to indicate that the threats posed to patent owners by petitioners "abusing the system" and filing multiple petitions is not as rampant or pressing as many believed -- at least based on the PTAB's metrics. The effect that these statistics really have on strategies for navigating post-grant proceedings moving forward, however, really seems to be threefold, all depending on the chair you're sitting in.
First, if you're in the petitioner's chair, and you want to make multiple attempts at invalidating a patent using these proceedings (e.g., correct deficiencies of your own petition, divide and conquer claims, or show another petitioner what they should have argued), you're going to be inclined to throw good money after what you've perceived to be bad (or, more fairly, incomplete) results. Second, if you're in the patent owner's chair, you don't really care what this study says or what happened to anybody else, because you just got a second (or potentially third, etc.) petition dropped in your lap and you want to know the best path forward. And third, if you're in the PTAB's chair, based on this study, you probably don't even think there's a problem, and even if there is, you'll deal with it in the "broad discretion" you've been granted by 35 U.S.C. §§ 314(a) and 325(d).
But all said, because this strategy is likely not going away in the foreseeable future, we will turn to the factors and strategies at play when navigating multiple petition proceedings in light of this study and subsequent case law in the next installment.
Posted at 11:19 PM in Patent Trial and Appeal Board, Post-Grant Proceedings | Permalink | Comments (2)
CPA Global will hosting a webinar entitled "Achieve the 'QUALITY' in Patents and Avoid Common Mistakes" on March 29, 2018 beginning at 11:00 am (CT). Larry M. Goldstein will discuss:
• The patent value hierarchy
• Definitions of "good" and "valuable"
• Quality in provisional applications and non-provisional applications
Posted at 11:38 PM in Federal Circuit, Patentable Subject Matter | Permalink | Comments (14)
Posted at 11:30 PM in Biotech/Pharma Business | Permalink | Comments (4)
Posted at 11:03 PM in Federal Circuit, Patentable Subject Matter | Permalink | Comments (5)
We recently noted that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office appears to have taken the position that neither party has the burden of persuasion with regard to Motions to Amend after the Aqua Products v. Matal decision. Certainly, the Patent Owner no longer has the burden, as that is one of the only conclusions that can be ascertained from that en banc decision. However, in no circumstance has the Board expressed the opposite conclusion that the burden falls on the petitioner. Instead, everything that has come from the Chief Judge or the Board suggests that the Patent Office has taken a third approach -- that neither party currently has the burden. As a case in point, the Patent Office filed its Intervenor's Petition for Panel Rehearing last month in Bosch Automotive Service Solutions, LLC v. Matal. As we noted at the time, the Office was not asking the Federal Circuit to alter its judgment in that case. Rather, it believed that the panel decision incorrectly stated the holding of Aqua Products. The Federal Circuit last week granted the petition for the limited purpose of amending the earlier opinion. However, the new opinion still might not be completely to the Patent Office's liking.
Before granting the petition for this limited purpose, the Federal Circuit had requested a response from Bosch Automotive, to which Bosch asserted that the petition should be denied. In so doing, it said that "[t]o the extent some of the judges [in Aqua Products] found 35 U.S.C. Section 316(e) ambiguous, the panel opinion in this matter resolved the ambiguity." The Federal Circuit took this as evidence that the original "opinion could be improperly misread." Therefore, it amended the sentence:
Rather, the petitioner bears the burden of proving that the proposed amended claims are unpatentable "by a preponderance of the evidence." 35 U.S.C. § 316(e).
Rather, the petitioner bears the burden of proving that the proposed amended claims are unpatentable "by a preponderance of the evidence."
Obviously, this still is a pronouncement from the Federal Circuit that the petitioner now bears the burden in Motions to Amend, and any suggestion from the Office to the contrary will need to be revised. However, it does remove the citation to the statute. As such, it removes any suggestion that the Court believes that the statute is unambiguous. Correspondingly, should the Office choose to promulgate rules to shift the burden back to the Patent Owner (as Aqua Products suggests it can), then it could be entitled to Chevron deference (which wouldn't be the case if the statute were unambiguous).
As a result, we are still left guessing whether the Patent Office intends to promulgate such a rule, but the pathway forward appears clearer than it did (if the Office show chooses). Perhaps newly confirmed Director Iancu will provide some insight during his "Fireside Chat" at the 2018 PTAB Bar Association Conference in Washington D.C. on March 22, 2018. According to the PTAB Bar, this will be the first time since he was named as Director that he addresses a formal gathering of lawyers who appear before the PTAB. This author will be in attendance at the Conference, and looks forward to any clue that the new Director might suggest. We will, of course, continue to monitor developments and report any updates in this space as warranted.
Posted at 11:56 PM in Post-Grant Proceedings | Permalink | Comments (0)
District Court Throws Out Haptic Feedback Claims on Grounds of Patent Ineligible Subject Matter
The Plaintiff, Immersion Corp., alleged that Fitbit's wearable health and fitness devices infringe three of Immersion's patents, each of which involve "haptic" feedback technology -- namely, technology that provides forces, vibrations, or other motion feedback that recreates a sense of touch for a user. Fitbit filed a motion to dismiss contending that the asserted claims of each patent are patent ineligible under § 101. The District Court denied Fitbit's motion on two of the three patents, but granted the motion with respect to U.S. Patent No. 8,638,301 (the '301 patent).
The two patents at issue that survived the motion, U.S. Patent No. 8,059,105 (the '105 patent) and U.S. Patent No. 8,351,299 (the '299 patent), are directed to having touchscreens and touchpads provide haptic feedback in response to user input received via such touchscreens and touchpads, and having a toothbrush or other device provide haptic feedback in response to a mechanism sensing a condition (e.g., a threshold number of brush strokes being met, or a time period expiring), respectively. Claims that Immersion asserted as representative of the eligibility of each of these two patents are produced below:
U.S. Patent No. 8,059,105:
one or more processors configured to receive an input signal and generate a force signal based on the input signal, wherein the input signal is associated with a user-independent event, the user-independent event comprising one or more of a reminder event, an initiation of a task, a processing of the task, a conclusion of the task, a receipt of an email, or an event occurring in a game; and
U.S. Patent No. 8,351,299:
In contending the validity of the '105 patent, Fitbit argued that "[t]here is no purpose for the haptic effect beyond simply communicating to the user" (i.e., providing a notification to the user) that the claimed "user-independent" event occurred. Fitbit also argued that Immersion attempted to frame an abstract idea as a device claim, citing Alice in that "the mere presence of physical components in the claims is insufficient to confer patent eligibility."
But the District Court did not ignore the physical components of the claims, and in applying step one of the Alice framework, found the U.S. Supreme Court's Diehr decision and the Federal Circuit's Thales Visionix decision to be instructive. In particular, the District Court stated that characterizing claim 19 as being directed to the abstract idea of providing a notification (e.g., a haptic notification) "strays too far from the weight of the claim," and went on to give reasons why containing such an abstract idea was not enough to elevate the claim to a level of ineligibility:
The weight of the claim clearly focuses on a tangible, non-abstract device as the invention which, through the allegedly unconventional combination of components, contains the new and useful feature of notifying the device's user of independent events through vibration. See Thales Visionix, 850 F.3d at 1348-49; '105 patent at col. 1:64-col. 2:3 (noting that touchpads of the prior art lack haptic feedback); '105 patent at col. 12:61-67 (discussing scenario in which a user is notified of an event by vibration after having looked away from the screen). Indeed, a significant majority of the specification details various physical features of the claimed inventions, including different types of actuators and how an actuator can be coupled to the housing of the device. See '105 patent at col. 5:5-col. 12:49, col. 15:1-col. 16:17. The fact that part of the claim contains an abstract idea does not make the claim patent-ineligible under § 101. See Alice, 134 S. Ct. at 2354 ("[A]n invention is not rendered ineligible for patent simply because it involves an abstract concept.").
Further, the District Court found that "Immersion's invention of a touchpad or other similar device that provides haptic feedback is a new arrangement of known components that solves the problem of how to provide non-audio, non-visual notification to a user," and is thus patent-eligible. Finding step one of the Alice framework to be met, the District Court did not proceed to step two.
Next, the District Court addressed the '299 patent and again stopped their analysis after step one. Fitbit's arguments here were similar to the notification and physical component arguments noted above with respect to the '105 patent, but Fitbit also argued that providing a notification when a threshold has been reached is a well-known, fundamental practice. The District Court found these arguments to be unpersuasive for nearly the same reasons as the '105 patent, and analogized to Core Wireless in support of its conclusion:
Namely, characterizing claims 14 and 20 as directed to the abstract idea of [haptic] notification based on motion or a timer ignores the fact that the claimed invention is a tangible device comprising a new and useful arrangement of components that solves the problem of how to notify a user that a predetermined number of motions have occurred in an environment where audio or visual alerts would not be effective. See Thales Visionix, 850 F.3d at 1348-49. . . . Thus, because claim 14 and claim 20 disclose improvements in motion tracking devices, they are not directed to an abstract idea at step one, and the Court need not reach Alice step two. See Core Wireless, 880 F.3d at 1363; Thales Visionix, 850 F.3d at 1348-49.
The District Court then addressed the patent ineligibility of the '301 patent, whose claimed invention involves a mobile device transmitting a "haptic message" to another mobile device. The patent describes haptic messages as a useful form of non-linguistic communication that tie physical effects to a message, contrasting with more conventional messaging systems that may provide less or no contextual information associated with received and sent messages. For example, the patent describes a scenario in which one user appends a haptic signal simulating a heartbeat to a message, sends the message to the other user along with the haptic signal, which causes the other user's phone to vibrate in a manner that simulates the heartbeat pattern.
As a representative example of the asserted claims of the '301 patent, claim 27 is produced below:
receive a first data signal from a network interface, the network interface configured to receive signals transmitted by a second mobile device;
Immersion asserted claim 27 as representative of the eligibility of this patent, but the District Court did not agree, finding the asserted claims of the patent invalid after addressing both steps of the Alice framework.
In addressing step one, the District Court concluded that claim 27 is directed to "receiving sensor and data signals, analyzing those signals, and outputting other signals in response," and therefore falls well within the Federal Circuit's abstract idea category of gathering and processing information. The District Court walked through the steps of the claim and cited primarily to the decisions in both Electric Power Group and West View Research, in each of which the Federal Circuit found claims to be directed to some form of receiving data, analyzing data, and generating a visual or audio response to the data. Ultimately, the District Court's decision on step one appeared to rest on how claim 27 did not recite more details regarding how to receive the signals, determine a change in display, and determine the haptic effect, and also did not recite more-detailed physical components involved in carrying out the recited acts.
The District Court's step one conclusion here is an interesting point of both contrast and comparison with the step one conclusions reached for the other two patents. All three patents more or less involve a haptic effect, though in contrast to claim 27, the eligible claims of the other two patents recited not only specific physical components (e.g., an actuator) included in the system, but also more detail as to how that system and its specific components processed the data and performed other acts that lead to deliverance of the haptic effect. Despite acknowledging that the act of the processor "outputting the haptic effect" likely involves transmitting a signal to an actuator to cause the actuator to output the haptic effect, the District Court still found claim 27 to be directed to the abstract idea noted above:
Transmitting a signal to an actuator does not make the focus of the claim any less abstract because outputting a signal is no more than the transmission of data. Similarly, the Federal Circuit has held that displaying the results of collecting and analyzing information, without more, "is abstract as an ancillary part of such collection and analysis." [citations omitted]
With respect to step two, Immersion contended that the claim's inventive aspects include generating graphical and haptic feedback in response to exchanged messages was inventive, but the District Court disagreed, emphasizing again the lack of inventive detail in the claims:
The mobile devices, network interface, processor, and haptic feedback system are, in broad terms, generic, conventional components. The specification confirms that these are generic components. . . . Nothing about the claim or specification suggests that the way these steps are accomplished are anything but generic -- as explained above, the claims recite these steps only functionally and require no inventive algorithm or data structure for performing them.
Finally, the District Court distinguished claim 27 from the claim the Federal Circuit addressed in BASCOM, and instead analogized to the Federal Circuit decisions in both Electric Power Group and TDE Petroleum in finding that the ordered combination of elements did not bring the claim out of the realm of data collection/analysis and was recited no differently than the "ordinary order" in which data collection/analysis elements would appear.
Given the state of the asserted claims -- especially that of claim 27, compared with the other two patents -- the District Court's finding here is relatively unsurprising. Again, it appears as though the lack of detailed physical components and detailed algorithms is what doomed the '301 patent.
Posted at 11:04 PM in District Court, Patentable Subject Matter | Permalink | Comments (0)