Total Eclipse of the Claims

Alice was a busy girl Labor Day week. In the space of two days, the two month–old Supreme Court opinion was applied by district courts in California, Delaware, and Texas to grant dispositive motions finding patent claims patent–ineligible for claiming computer–implemented abstract ideas.

Loyalty Conversion: Sitting by designation in the Eastern District of Texas, Judge Bryson of the Federal Circuit granted a defense motion for judgment on the pleadings, finding that the plaintiff’s patents claimed the abstract idea of converting vendor loyalty award credits of one vendor into loyalty award credits of another vendor. The circuit court judge also used the occasion to signal his view on the common features of patent–ineligible claims under Alice: “[S]uch patents, although frequently dressed up in the argot of invention, simply describe a problem, announce purely functional steps that purport to solve the problem, and recite standard computer operations to perform some of the steps.”

Tuxis Technologies: A Delaware district court granted a motion to dismiss a complaint asserting a patent to computer–implemented “upselling.”

Eclipse IP: And in California, a federal judge dismiss a complaint asserting patents to computer–implemented methods of (1) asking someone whether they want to perform a task, and if they do, waiting for them to complete it, and if they do not, asking someone else; (2) asking someone to do a task, getting an affirmative response, and then waiting until the task is done; and (3) asking people, based on their location, to go places.

One common thread among the decisions—in addition to the fact that they were all wins for accused infringers—is that the court in each case found that the asserted claims were fatally flawed because they described work that could be performed by a human being. Computer–implementation added at most speed and efficiency, not enough to pass the Alice test. It would appear that those who see Alice as a game–changing opinion are starting to look righter and righter.