Card Verification v. Citigroup (N.D. Ill. 2014)
A growing number district court decision have followed the Supreme Court’s Alice Corp. decision by finding the asserted patent claims to be patent-ineligible as unduly encompassing an abstract idea.
In one recent decision, N.D. Ill. Judge Kendall has tepidly bucked the trend by denying a Fed R. Civ. Proc. R. 12(b)(6) motion for failure to state a claim — instead finding the asserted claims plausibly eligible.
The asserted patent claims cover a transaction verification method and the Judge agreed with defendant-Citygroup the general idea of verifying a transaction is an unpatentable abstract idea. (Claim 1 is pasted below. See Patent No. 5,826,245).
Moving to the second step of Alice, Judge Kendall found that the claims plausibly avoid the mental steps doctrine by requiring “pseudorandom tag generating software” and also plausibly requires a sufficiently concrete transformation so as to ground the abstract idea to a particular inventive implementation. Notably, for the second step, Judge Kendall did not draw the law from Alice, which seemingly required novelty in the ‘something more’ but instead quoted from the Federal Circuit’s 2013 holding that “additional substantive limitations [are required that] narrow, confine, or otherwise tie down the claim so that, in practical terms, it does not cover the full abstract idea itself.” Accenture Global Servs., GmbH v. Guidewire Software, Inc., 728 F.3d 1336, 1341 (Fed. Cir. 2013). Applying that law to the case, the court ruled that the claimed process of adding random number tags to data in the computer could be seen as “fundamentally altering the original confidential information.” With this analysis in hand, Judge Kendall denied the defendants’ motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim without prejudice.
The decision here is probably most important for its procedural stance. First, the defendants’ bold move was to file its motion to dismiss as a R. 12(b)(6) motion even before filing its answer to the complaint that would include defenses and counterclaims. Under Iqbal and Twombly, the complaint must state a claim that is ‘plausible on its face.’ Here, all that the court held was that the claim is plausible.
Although the outcome favored the patentee, the case is also a break from the tradition that a patent’s presumption of validity is generally sufficient to survive such a motion to dismiss. In Ultramercial, the Federal Circuit addressed a similar finding and held that dismissal at such an early stage is only appropriate when “the only plausible reading of the patent [is] that there is clear and convincing evidence of ineligibility.” Ultramercial, Inc. v. Hulu, LLC, 722 F.3d 1335 (Fed. Cir. 2013) vacated on other grounds 132 S. Ct. 24131 (2012). Of course, the clear-and-convincing standard is with regard to questions of fact while the eligibility inquiry is a question of law that depends upon few (if any) questions of fact.
= = = = =
Read the decision here: Kendall101
Claim 1:
A method for giving verification information for a transaction between an initiating party and a verification-seeking party, the verification information being given by a third, verifying party, based on confidential information in the possession of the initiating party, the method comprising:
on behalf of the initiating party, generating first and second tokens each of which represents some but not all of the confidential information,
sending the first token electronically via a nonsecure communication network from the initiating party to the verification-seeking party,
sending the second token electronically via a nonsecure communication network from the initiating party to the verifying party,
sending the first token electronically via a nonsecure communication network from the verification-seeking party to the verifying party,
verifying the confidential information at the verifying party based on the first and second tokens, and sending the verification information electronically via a nonsecure communication network from the verifying party to the verification-seeking party.