Alice Strikes Again; Unified Patents Strikes Back

Two newsworthy items hit our radar this week:

• Judge George H. Wu of the Central District of California has issued another ruling under Alice v. CLS Bank, this time concluding that patent claims to a method for automatically animating lip synchronization and facial expression for animated characters were patent–ineligible. Once again, he made that ruling based solely on the pleadings filed by the patent–asserter. What stands out about this next in the recent line of decisions applying Alice is that the claims viewed in isolation did not seem to cover an abstract idea. What Judge Wu found, however, was that the asserted claims, viewed in light of prior art cited and discussed in the patent specification, claimed nothing more than the abstract idea of adding rules to conventional activity described in the prior art. Thus, claim language that looked tangible and specific amounted to nothing more than an admonition to use rules to do what the prior art already described. In the judge’s words, “that still leaves an abstract idea at the point of novelty, preventing the development of any additional ways to use that abstract idea in the relevant field.”
• In another development, an outfit called Unified Patents has emerged as a self–proclaimed antidote to the non–practicing entity (a/k/a patent troll) problem. The business, which solicits subscriptions from companies in discrete technological fields, such as cloud computing, claims to use subscription revenue to monitor patents in the field, assess their validity, and to file, when appropriate, petitions for reexamination with the Patent Office to attack the validity of suspect patents. Unified Patents appears to be the latest members–only venture to try to undermine the patent–troll business model of serial litigation followed by settlements based on the high cost of defense rather than a real assessment of the merits of an asserted patent.