Opinion ID: 4090002
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Alice Step 2: Do the Asserted Claims

Text: include an inventive concept? In Alice, the Supreme Court described an “inventive concept” as “an element or combination of elements that is ‘sufficient to ensure that the patent in practice amounts to significantly more than a patent upon the [ineligible concept] itself.’” Alice, 134 S. Ct. at 2355 (quoting Mayo, 132 S. Ct. at 1294) (alteration in original). Synopsys equates the inventive concept inquiry with novelty and contends that the Asserted Claims contain an inventive concept because they were not shown to have been anticipated by (35 U.S.C. § 102) or obvious over (35 U.S.C. § 103) the prior art. See Appellant’s Opening Br. 43 (“[T]he district court ignored the fact that the methods in the asserted claims of the Gregory patents were entirely novel solutions and could not be found anywhere in the prior art.”). That position misstates the law. It is true that “the § 101 patent-eligibility inquiry and, say, the § 102 novelty inquiry might sometimes overlap.” Mayo, 132 S. Ct. at 1304. But, a claim for a new abstract idea is still an abstract idea. The search for a § 101 inventive concept is thus distinct from demonstrating § 102 novelty. That being said, the contours of what constitutes an inventive concept are far from precise. In DDR Holdings, we held that claims “directed to systems and methods of generating a composite web page that combines certain visual elements of a ‘host’ website SYNOPSYS, INC. v. MENTOR GRAPHICS CORPORATION 25 with content of a third-party merchant” contained the requisite inventive concept. 773 F.3d at 1248. We explained that the claims at issue involved a technological solution that overcame a specific challenge unique to the Internet. Id. at 1259. This distinguished the claims at issue from those claims found unpatentable in earlier cases. Id. And, it ensured that the claims satisfied the Alice Step 2 inquiry under any conceivable articulation of the claims’ underlying abstract idea. Id. at 1257. In BASCOM, we likewise held that claims “directed to filtering content on the Internet” contained an inventive concept. 827 F.3d at 1348. We recognized that “the limitations of the claims, taken individually, recite generic computer, network and Internet components, none of which is inventive by itself.” Id. at 1349. We explained, however, that “an inventive concept can be found in the non-conventional and non-generic arrangement of known, conventional pieces.” Id. at 1350. We found that the claims at issue contained just such an inventive arrangement through “the installation of a filtering tool at a specific location, remote from the end-users, with customizable filtering features specific to each end user.” Id. The claimed custom filter could be located remotely from the user because the invention exploited the ability of Internet service providers to associate a search request with a particular individual account. Id. This technical solution overcame defects in prior art embodiments and elevated an otherwise abstract idea to a patentable invention. Id. The Asserted Claims, in contrast to those at issue in DDR Holdings and BASCOM, contain no such technical solution. To the extent the Asserted Claims add anything to the abstract idea (i.e., translating a functional description of a logic circuit into a hardware component description of the logic circuit), it is the use of assignment conditions as an intermediate step in the translation process. See Appellant’s Reply Br. 21 (“The use of as26 SYNOPSYS, INC. v. MENTOR GRAPHICS CORPORATION signment conditions in converting user descriptions into specific logic circuits is, without question, an inventive concept.”). But, given that the claims are for a mental process, assignment conditions, which merely aid in mental translation as opposed to computer efficacy, are not an inventive concept that takes the Asserted Claims beyond their abstract idea. 15 Unlike the claims at issue in DDR Holdings and BASCOM, the Asserted Claims do not introduce a technical advance or improvement. They contain nothing that “amounts to significantly more than a patent upon the [abstract idea] itself.’” Alice, 134 S. Ct. at 2355 (citation omitted).