By Dennis Crouch
Alexsam, Inc. v. IDT Corp. (Fed. Cir. 2013)
I recently posted on Alexsam’s pending litigation in the Eastern District of Texas. In that case, the jury sided with the patentee Alexsam and rejected the defendants’ arguments that the patent was invalid. The appeal here involves the same patents directed to a system for activating gift cards at the time that they are purchased. See U.S. Patent No. 6,000,608. The most interesting aspect of the decision comes from Judge Mayer’s dissent where he argued that asserted patent claims “disclose nothing more than an abstract idea for making a business run more efficiently, thereby failing to meet the subject matter eligibility requirements set forth in 35 U.S.C. § 101.”
The claim issue (Claim 57) reads as follows:
A multifunction card system comprising:
a. at least one card having a unique identification number encoded on it, said identification number comprising a bank identification number approved by the American Banking Association for use in a banking network;
b. a transaction processor receiving card activation data from an unmodified existing standard retail point-of-sale device, said card activation data including said unique identification number;
c. a processing hub receiving directly or indirectly said activation data from said transaction processor; and
d. said processing hub activating an account corresponding to the unique identification number, thereby permitting later access to said account.
To reach his conclusion that the claim fails to disclose eligible subject matter, Judge Mayer first began by identifying the core inventive concept of the claim. Here, the idea behind the patent is that it allows a card to be activated by swiping it through the terminal used for processing credit card transactions rather than having a dedicated activation terminal. The benefit of that approach is that no special equipment is needed for activating gift cards and the patent application states that no new technology is required in order to allow standard point-of-sale devices to activate gift cards.
The way Judge Mayer describes this setup immediately raises novelty and obviousness concerns in my mind. Indeed, Judge Mayer writes that the case “presents the anomalous situation in which a patentee attempts to preserve the validity of his claims by arguing that they contain nothing new.” Ordinarily, when patent claims “contain nothing new,” they are found invalid for lacking novelty or nonobviousness. Indeed, millions of patent claims are rejected each year by the USPTO for this very reason. And, the primary thrust of the US patent examination system is to ensure that patents are only issued for inventions that are sufficiently new. In this case, the defendants argued that claims were obvious and anticipated as a matter of law. However, instead of addressing that issue that was actually appealed, Judge Mayer focused on the Subject Matter Eligibility that was not raised on appeal – seeing subject matter eligibility as a threshold issue that must be decided first:
Whether claims are directed to statutory subject matter is a “threshold” question, Bilski v. Kappos, 130 S. Ct. 3218, 3225 (2010), which must be addressed before this court can consider subordinate issues related to obviousness and infringement. See Parker v. Flook, 437 U.S. 584, 593 (1978) (“Flook”) (emphasizing that “[t]he obligation to determine what type of discovery is sought to be patented” so as to determine whether it falls within the ambit of section 101 “must precede the determination of whether that discovery is, in fact, new or obvious” (emphasis added)); In re Comiskey, 554 F.3d 967, 973 (Fed. Cir. 2009) (“Only if the requirements of § 101 are satisfied is the inventor allowed to pass through to the other requirements for patentability, such as novelty under § 102 and . . . non-obviousness under § 103.” (citations and internal quotation marks omitted)).
In our 2010 article, Professor Robert Merges and I argued that the law does not require the “threshold” question be decided in any particular order. See Dennis Crouch & Robert P. Merges, Operating Efficiently Post-Bilski by Ordering Patent Doctrine Decision-Making, 25 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 1673 (2010). Indeed, thresholds are crossed all throughout a journey. Judge Mayer is in the minority on this point of doctrinal ordering. Although rejecting some of our arguments, the CLS Bank plurality opinion agreed with Merges and myself that “district courts may exercise their discretion to begin elsewhere when they perceive that another section of the Patent Act might provide a clearer and more expeditious path to resolving a dispute.” (Citing Merges & Crouch).
The second major problem with Judge Mayer’s dissent is the implicit ruling that Subject Matter Eligibility is not waivable and instead should be raised sua sponte by an appellate court. Here, the §101 eligibility question was not raised by the defendant-appellants in the appeal, nor were they discussed in oral arguments. In the past, both Judges Mayer and Dyk have raised §101 issues sua sponte on appeal — essentially finding that subject matter eligibility questions are on par with the issue of a court’s subject matter jurisdiction.
Finally, Judge Mayer’s decision highlights the failure the CLS Bank decision – because there was no majority opinion in that case, Judge Mayer did not feel the need to even cite that recent pronouncement by the court that directly relates to the case at hand.
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Sanctions: The district court awarded sanctions to the patentee for the defendants’ litigation misconduct in failing to provide to satisfy the appropriate discovery requests regarding the accused systems. The sanction was quite harsh. In particular, the district court deemed several accused systems were infringing as a sanction for ITD’s failure to disclose the fact that its cards contain BINs in their card numbers. On appeal, the Federal Circuit affirmed the sanction. I suspect that the “Patent Abuse Reduction Act” would further embolden accused infringers to play discovery games by avoiding disclosing key information or admitting key facts that would greatly simplify the litigation.
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Unpaid License Still a License: Some of IDTs systems use the MasterCard computer network. That is important because MasterCard has obtained a license from Alexsam to practice the invention. The agreement specifically states that other parties (such as IDT) that are using the MasterCard computer network will be “deemed sublicensed under an implied sublicense.” As part of the agreement, MasterCard is also required to report the total number of licensed transactions to Alexsam at the end of each month, and to pay a fee for each transaction. In this case, however, MasterCard never reported IDT as a sublicensee or paid the required royalties. On appeal, the Federal Circuit agreed with IDT that the MasterCard related sales were licensed and that IDT is therefore not liable for those. In reaching its conclusions, the court noted that the MasterCard agreement did not condition the sublicense on payment of the royalties. Further, the court the cited to its decision in Tessera, Inc. v. Int’l Trade Comm’n, No. 2010-1176, 2011 WL 1944067 (Fed. Cir. 2011) where it held that failure to pay royalties “did not convert authorized sales into unauthorized sales.”
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