Tag Archives: RFID

Certiorari Denied in Eligibility Cases

Patent, , , , , , , , ,

by Dennis Crouch

In spite of robust amicus backing, including from the US Solicitor General, the Supreme Court has declined to review two pending patent-eligibility petitions: Interactive Wearables v. Polar and Tropp v. Travel Sentry. These cases contended that the Alice/Mayo framework produced (1) instability and unpredictability in the law; (2) facilitated non-evidence based judgments by district courts; and (3) prohibited patenting of subject matter that has traditionally been eligible for patents.

In my perspective, these cases wouldn’t have led to pro-patentee opinions from the Supreme Court as the inventions involved were not firmly rooted in technology. Rather, the court would likely have regarded the appellate cases as correctly denying eligibility.

The case of utmost importance still awaiting judgment, in my opinion, is CareDx Inc. v. Natera, Inc. CareDx is centered around the eligibility of an important diagnostic method for early detection of transplant organ failure. In this instance, the patent holder (Stanford University) solved a significant, longstanding problem that others had been unable to resolve. However, the lower courts determined that the patent claims were improperly directed towards a law of nature. Another petition pending before the Court is the eligibility appeal in Avery Dennison Corp. v. ADASA Inc. In the Avery Dennison case, the patent for RFID unique-ID encoding was deemed eligible and therefore valid on debatable grounds. The patent challenger has petitioned the Supreme Court, arguing that the lower courts are unduly narrowing their eligibility assessment.

A further petition, Killian v. Vidal, was reportedly filed in April but has yet to appear on the Supreme Court docket. Killian’s patent application proposes a computerized algorithm for detecting “overlooked eligibility for social security disability insurance.” The petition contends that the uncertainty created by the courts, along with the non-statutory eligibility exceptions, amount to violations of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and Due Process. Furthermore, the petition asserts that these judge-made exceptions “overstep the constitutional authority of the courts.” This petition has a minimal likelihood of being granted.

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The court also denied certiorari in the skinny-label FDA-Patent case of Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc. v. GlaxoSmithKline LLC.

Eligibility for Dummies; Benson Redux

Patent, , , ,

by Dennis Crouch

I’ve become somewhat callous toward patent eligibility jurisprudence and so was surprised when I read the Federal Circuit’s decision in ADASA Inc. v. Avery Dennison Corp., 55 F.4th 900 (Fed. Cir. Dec 16, 2022). The case concluded that constructively dividing a fixed-length binary number into different sub-portions was not an abstract idea.  Now, the accused infringer has asked the Supreme Court for review.

ADASA’s US Patent 9,798,967 is directed toward an RFID chip “encoded with a unique object number.”  This object number as various blocks pre-allocated to identify the selling-company, product reference, and serial number as shown below.  The serial number has a unique feature of being divided into a section of “most significant bits” (MSBs) and “least significant bits” (LSBs). This division between MSBs and LSBs help in the allocation of unique serial numbers in a distributed production system.  The basic approach:

  • A product-line will be exclusively allocated a particular MSB and all possible accompanying LSBs. It will then enable RFID chips using the allocated MSB and then sequentially incrementing the LSB.
  • A separate product line might also be simultaneously enabling other other chips. To ensure no overlap in serial numbers, the second-line will be allocated a different MSB.
  • The result then is that we can guarantee that each chip has a unique serial number despite parallel production lines.

The claims do not appear to include any novel features other than this constructed division between bits in a binary number.  (Claim 1, is reproduced below). In its petition, the adjudged infringer relies heavily on the old cases of Benson and Flook to argue that the setup here lacks eligibility.

Question presented:

Radio Frequency Identification Device (RFID) tags are encoded with lengthy serial numbers that uniquely identify particular items. The patent at issue in this case designates the leading bits in a binary serial number as “the most significant bits,” and directs that all serial numbers in an allocated block begin with the same “most significant bits.”

The question presented is whether that claim, by subdividing a serial number into “most significant bits” that are assigned such that they remain identical across RFID tags, constitutes patent-eligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101.

Avery Dennison Petition.

Chief Judge Moore wrote the opinion and concluded that the claims were not directed to an abstract idea but rather provides a novel data structure within a serial number.  Here, the idea is that the patentee was able to create a new data field that was “not a mere mental process, but a hardware-based data structure focused on improvements to the technological process by which that data is encoded;” and an improvement with “important technological consequences.”

An interesting feature is that the general idea presented by the patentee was already identified and discussed in the book RFID for Dummies.  If Avery Dennison loses here, then the district court will hold a trial on anticipation.  Still, the “for Dummies” label has strong rhetorical appeal — should everything in that book title be considered an abstract idea?  The petitioner writes:

“[A]bstract ideas are not patentable.” … It is hard to imagine a more blatant transgression of that rule than the claim in this case, which sought a patent monopoly over the simple concept of treating one long serial number as the combination of two shorter numbers, and then [requiring] blocks of RFID tags all start with the same shorter number. At bottom, that claim is no different from a direction to mentally subdivide all telephone numbers into two component parts and then assign the same leading part to an allocated block of numbers (e.g., all telephone numbers in the District of Columbia start with 202). That may be a good idea (indeed, the concept in ADASA’s patent appears in the pages of RFID for Dummies), but it is no more patentable than the other good but abstract ideas that this Court has held unpatentable for more than 150 years.

Id.  I’m confident that if the Supreme Court takes this case, it would even further expand eligibility doctrine.

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