By Jason Rantanen
Whitserve, LLC v. Computer Packages, Inc. (Fed. Cir. 2012) Download 11-1206-1261
Panel: Prost, Mayer (dissenting), O'Malley (majority author)
Much of this opinion deals with relatively typical appeal issues of infringement, anticipation, and damages. Two issues are worth highlighting, however.
Prove Every Claim Element: During the district court proceedings, CPi had focused its anticipation case on claim 10 of Patent No. 6,981,007, and the Federal Circuit agreed that claim 10 was indeed anticipated. However, the CAFC also concluded that CPi had failed to present detailed evidence explaining how each claim element of the remaining claims was discussed in the prior art, and thus affirmed the jury verdict of no anticipation as to those claims. The moral of this story? In the absence of a stipulation that the validity of all the claims will rise and fall on a representative claim, patent challengers should make sure to present detailed evidence on every element of every claim they are challenging when advancing one claim as a representative claim. Here, CPi had presented cursory evidence, at best, asking its expert only "are all the elements of those claims disclosed in the Schrader patent?” to which its expert replied “Yes, they are.”
Patentable Subject Matter: Writing in dissent, Judge Mayer would have sua sponte found three of the asserted patents invalid due to lack of patentable subject matter. "Because the WhitServe patents simply describe a basic and widely-understood concept—that it is useful to provide people with reminders of important due dates and deadlines—and then apply that concept using conventional computer technology and the Internet, they fail to meet section 101’s subject matter eligibility requirements." Slip Op. at 51. This issue, in Judge Mayer's view, was appropriate for the court to take up despite not having been specifically raised by the parties on appeal because there were significant changes in the law since the trial court's decision rejecting CPi's section 101 argument, namely, Mayo v. Prometheus, 132 S. Ct. 1289, 1303 (2012).
Claim 1 of Patent No. 5,895,468, which is representative of these patent claims, is below.
A device for automatically delivering professional services to a client comprising:
a computer;
a database containing a plurality of client reminders, each of the client reminders comprising a date field having a value attributed thereto;
software executing on said computer for automatically querying said database by the values attributed to each client reminder date field to retrieve a client reminder;
software executing on said computer for automatically generating a client response form based on the retrieved client reminder;
a communication link between said computer and the Internet;
software executing on said computer for automatically transmitting the client response form to the client through said communication link; and,
software executing on said computer for automatically receiving a reply to the response form from the client through said communication link.
Edit: The post should have read "present detailed evidence," not "prevent detailed evidence." Patent challengers certainly don't want to prevent evidence of patent invalidity! – Jason