Opinion ID: 1039945
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The System Claims on their Own

Text: As indicated earlier, the system claims are ineligible for patenting, aside from the status of the method claims, because they fail to include limitations that set them apart from the abstract idea of handling insurancerelated information. The district court, relying on the Supreme Court’s Bilski opinion, found that all claims of the ’284 patent were invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The court determined that the abstract idea of the patent was drawn to “concepts for organizing data rather than to specific devices or systems.” Accenture, 800 F. Supp. 2d at 621. The court further held that the limitations present in the claims did not significantly distinguish the claims from that abstract idea. Id. at 621 (citing Bilski, 130 S. Ct. at 3231; Parker, 437 U.S. at 589–90). In this regard, the district court’s analysis was similar to the abstractness analysis articulated in the plurality opinion of CLS Bank. Accenture argues that system claim 1 remains patenteligible even after our decision in CLS Bank. It contends that the claim is patent-eligible because the ’284 patent implements the general idea of generating tasks for insurance claim processing, but narrows it through its recitation of a combination of computer components including an insurance transaction database, a task library database, a client component, and a server component, which includes an event processor, a task engine, and a task assistant. Accenture further argues that the complexity and detail of the specification demonstrate that the patent is an advance in computer software and not simply a claim to an abstract idea. Additionally, Accenture points to our recently-issued decision in Ultramercial as support for the patent-eligibility of system claim 1. ACCENTURE GLOBAL SERVICES v. GUIDEWIRE SOFTWARE, INC. 15 Guidewire responds that system claim 1 sets forth the same steps and recites all the same elements as method claim 8 and requires no specific hardware or any particular algorithm. With regard to Ultramercial, Guidewire distinguishes that case based on its procedural posture and the fact that the district court in Ultramercial did not have the benefit of claim construction or discovery. The abstract idea at the heart of system claim 1 of the ’284 patent is “generating tasks [based on] rules . . . to be completed upon the occurrence of an event.” ’284 patent col. 107 ll. 25, 38–39. Although not as broad as the district court’s abstract idea of organizing data, it is nonetheless an abstract concept. Having identified the abstract idea of the claim, we proceed with a preemption analysis to determine whether “additional substantive limitations . . . narrow, confine, or otherwise tie down the claim so that, in practical terms, it does not cover the full abstract idea itself.” CLS Bank, 717 F.3d at 1282 (citing Mayo, 132 S. Ct. at 1300; Bilski, 130 S. Ct. at 3231; Diamond v. Diehr, 450 U.S. at 187); see also Ultramercial, 2013 WL 3111303, at  (“[T]he relevant inquiry is whether a claim, as a whole, includes meaningful limitations restricting it to an application, rather than merely an abstract idea.” (citing Prometheus, 132 S. Ct. at 1297)). Accenture attempts to limit the abstract idea of claim 1 by applying it in a computer environment and within the insurance industry. However, those types of limitations do not “narrow, confine, or otherwise tie down the claim.” As we have recently held, simply implementing an abstract concept on a computer, without meaningful limitations to that concept, does not transform a patentineligible claim into a patent-eligible one. See Bancorp, 687 F.3d at 1280. Further, as the Supreme Court stated in Bilski, limiting the application of an abstract idea to one field of use does not necessarily guard against preempting all uses of the abstract idea. Bilski, 130 S. Ct. at 3231 (finding that limiting abstract concept of hedging risk to the commodities and energy markets did not make 16 ACCENTURE GLOBAL SERVICES v. GUIDEWIRE SOFTWARE, INC. claim patent-eligible); see also Diehr, 450 U.S. at 191 (stating that the prohibition against patenting an abstract principle “cannot be circumvented by attempting to limit the use of the [principle] to a particular technological environment” (citing Flook, 437 U.S. at 584)). Accenture’s attempts to limit the abstract concept to a computer implementation and to a specific industry thus do not provide additional substantive limitations to avoid preempting the abstract idea of system claim 1. Regarding Accenture’s argument concerning the complexity of the specification, including the specification’s detailed software implementation guidelines, the important inquiry for a § 101 analysis is to look to the claim. “When the insignificant computer-based limitations are set aside from those claims that contain such limitations, the question under § 101 reduces to an analysis of what additional features remain in the claims.” Bancorp, 687 F.3d at 1279 (citing Mayo, 132 S. Ct. at 1297). The limitations of claim 1 are essentially a database of tasks, a means to allow a client to access those tasks, and a set of rules that are applied to that task on a given event. Although the specification of the ’284 patent contains very detailed software implementation guidelines, the system claims themselves only contain generalized software components arranged to implement an abstract concept on a computer. The limitations of the system claims of the ’284 patent do not provide sufficient additional features or limit the abstract concept in a meaningful way. In other words, the complexity of the implementing software or the level of detail in the specification does not transform a claim reciting only an abstract concept into a patent-eligible system or method. Accenture argues that our decision in Ultramercial compels reversal of the district court’s invalidation of the system claims. However, as previously discussed, unlike the patent at issue in Ultramercial, Accenture’s claims do not contain “significantly more than the underlying abstract concept.” The claims in Ultramercial contained ACCENTURE GLOBAL SERVICES v. GUIDEWIRE SOFTWARE, INC. 17 additional limitations from the abstract idea of advertising as currency, such as limiting the transaction to an Internet website, offering free access conditioned on viewing a sponsor message, and only applying to a media product. See Ultramercial, 2013 WL 3111303, at . The ’284 patent’s system claim 1, however, is similar to the patent-ineligible system claim from CLS Bank. That claim contained limitations such as a data storage unit and a general purpose computer that received transactions, adjusted variables in the data storage unit, and generated instructions. CLS Bank, 717 F.3d at 1289. The district court’s finding of patent ineligibility for the asserted system claim in CLS Bank was affirmed by an equally divided court. Id. at 1273. Similarly, in Bancorp, we found a system claim comprising digital storage, a policy generator, a debitor, and various calculators patent-ineligible because the limitations of that claim were directed to no more than the abstract idea of managing a stable value protected life insurance policy. Bancorp, 687 F.3d at 1272, 1280–81. Comparing these cases, we find that the system claim of the ’284 patent is more akin to the patent-ineligible claims of CLS Bank and Bancorp. Unlike the claims at issue in Ultramercial, the system claims in the ’284 patent contain only generalized steps of generating a task in response to events. Moreover, we agree with Guidewire that the proce- dural posture of Ultramercial creates a different situation from the case before us. In Ultramercial, we reversed the district court’s grant of a defendant’s preanswer motion to dismiss. Ultramercial, 2013 WL 3111303, at . In that case, the court found Ultramercial’s patent ineligible under § 101 without formally construing the claims and with no discovery. Id. On that posture, we noted that “the complaint and the patent must by themselves show clear and convincing evidence that the claim is not directed to an application of an abstract idea, but to a disembodied abstract idea itself.” Id. at . We further noted that the district court should have either construed 18 ACCENTURE GLOBAL SERVICES v. GUIDEWIRE SOFTWARE, INC. the claims in the light most favorable to the patentee or required the defendant to establish subject matter ineligibility by clear and convincing evidence. Id. Accenture does not point to any error in claim construction or to a fact issue that requires additional discovery. In this case, the court conducted formal discovery, construed the claims, and ruled on a motion for summary judgment. Although we determined that formal claim construction was not needed to evaluate the patent in Ultramercial, the procedural posture before us presents a different scenario than what we encountered in Ultramercial. In sum, the system claims of the ’284 patent are pa- tent-ineligible both because Accenture was unable to point to any substantial limitations that separate them from the similar, patent-ineligible method claim and because, under the two-part test of CLS Bank, the system claim does not, on its own, provide substantial limitations to the claim’s patent-ineligible abstract idea. We thus conclude that claims 1–7 of the ’284 patent are invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101. Accordingly, the decision of the district court granting summary judgment of invalidity under § 101 is AFFIRMED United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ______________________ ACCENTURE GLOBAL SERVICES, GMBH AND ACCENTURE LLP, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. GUIDEWIRE SOFTWARE, INC., Defendant-Appellee. ______________________ 2011-1486 ______________________ Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Delaware in No. 07-CV-0826, Judge Sue L. Robinson. ______________________