On Wednesday, April 18, new USPTO Director Andrei Iancu appeared for his first oversight hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Director was more open with the Committee compared to his confirmation process, leading to some interesting discussions. Algorithms Are Already Patentable A number of questions focused on the issue of patentable subject…
Tag Archive for patentable subject matter
A New § 101 Trio Shows That We Don’t Need § 101 Legislation
by Josh Landau •
The Bilski, Alice, Mayo, and Myriad cases are sometimes referred to as a § 101 quartet because they set forth the Supreme Court’s test for patentable subject matter under § 101. Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a new trio of § 101 cases emerge from Federal Circuit panels—Berkheimer, Aatrix, and Automated Tracking. The…
Innovation Is Alive And Well—Patenting Activity
by Josh Landau •
After examining the evidence for U.S. innovation as shown by startups and venture capital, and by R&D spending, I want to look at patenting activity—new patent applications and new patent grants. Particularly given accusations that the U.S. patent system has fallen behind other systems worldwide—accusations based on extremely questionable analysis—it’s worth looking at what patent…
The Alice Drizzle—Barely Even Noticeable
by Josh Landau •
At the end of the year, I took a look at whether Alice really had a significant impact on patents as a whole. The answer was that Alice simply doesn’t affect that many patent applications. But several important questions were left unanswered. I also wanted to know whether the affected applications are really being affected…
The “Alice Storm” Is More Of A Drizzle
by Josh Landau •
You might be familiar with Bob Sachs’ term “Alice Storm.” Sachs and his co-authors over at Bilski Blog argue that “Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank has had a dramatic impact on the allowability of computer implemented inventions.” I disagree, and some newly released data from the Patent Office seems to back me up. Alice has…
It’s The Claim Language—Except When It Isn’t
by Josh Landau •
Last week, the Federal Circuit handed down a decision in Visual Memory v. NVIDIA, deciding that the Visual Memory1 cache patents are patent-eligible under § 101. Unfortunately, in doing so the Federal Circuit makes the same mistake they’ve made a few times now—they’ve looked at the specification, not the claims, in order to justify finding…
CustomPlay, Annotated
by Josh Landau •
Near the end of July, CustomPlay sued Apple and Amazon. CustomPlay is owned by Max Abecassis, who also owns Nissim Corp. (Nissim has a long history of involvement with the DVD standard and nearly as long of a history of forcing companies to license its DVD patents; this is hardly Abecassis’ first go at patent…
The PTO’s § 101 Summary Report
by Josh Landau •
One of the most important developments over the past few years is the Supreme Court’s decision in Alice v. CLS Bank – a decision that articulated a distinction between patent-eligible inventions, and patent-ineligible abstract ideas. The Alice decision has enabled many companies, including small businesses, to defend themselves from baseless patent infringement lawsuits based on…
Should Abstract Ideas Be Unpatentable? The Answer Is A Snap
by Josh Landau •
Tuesday, Kaldren LLC sued Snap. (According to RPX, Kaldren is affiliated with IP Edge, a notorious patent troll.) Kaldren sued over a set of expired patents on such wonderful ideas as: Printing out a machine readable symbol; Reading a machine readable symbol; Using an address in a machine readable symbol to retrieve information from that…
ContentGuard: Validity and Privilege
by Josh Landau •
Monday I summarized the history of the ContentGuard cases, and yesterday I described the process of claim interpretation. Today, we’ll turn to an issue that we’ve focused on recently, patent validity. ContentGuard convinced the jury that the ContentGuard patents were valid—can they convince the Federal Circuit? Abstract Ideas We’ve written a lot about patents on…