This is a guest post written by Tim Molino who is the Policy Director for BSA, which as shortened its name to The Software Alliance. Prior to joining BSA, Tim was Chief Counsel for Sen. Klobuchar (MN) and before that, he was a patent litigator for eight years. The BSA has just filed an amicus brief in the Activision Blizzard case whose Section 101 issue is pending before the Federal Circuit. This is one of the several cases where parties are testing for the boundaries of Alice Corp. – Dennis
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by Tim Molino
The highly-anticipated Alice Corp. v CLS Bank case was widely expected to clarify the application of Section 101 to computer-implemented inventions and many expected the decision would answer the contentious question of whether software is eligible for patent protection. Instead, the Supreme Court issued a relatively narrow ruling that cast doubt on the eligibility of most business methods, but suggested that software-based inventions that “improve the functioning of the computer itself” or “effect an improvement in any other technology or technical field” would likely be eligible.
Now lower courts are beginning to apply the Alice and the Supreme Court’s distinction between abstract business practices and technological inventions. To date, the bulk of the district court decisions have dealt with so-called business method patents that recite a business practice or economic concept combined with a token recitation of implementation on a computer. District courts have correctly invalidated these patents under 101 in the wake of Alice and Bilski. But we have also seen some troubling decisions where Alice has been misapplied to invalidate patents directed to real technology, rather than abstract business concepts.
Docket Navigator data suggests that in 2015, we could see more than 150 patent cases in district courts, arguing the patents are invalid on 101 grounds – and if the current trends continue, the patent would be invalidated in as many as 111 of those cases. These trend lines are troubling. With more than $50 billion in software research and development incentives at stake, it is imperative that the Federal Circuit make a course correction and send a clear signal that software-based technology is eligible for patent protection.
McRO v. Activision Blizzard – An Opportunity
Fortunately, the Federal Circuit has an opportunity to provide much-needed guidance to the lower courts in the upcoming McRO v. Activision Blizzard appeal. The McRO patents describe a computerized process for “automated rules-based use of morph targets and delta sets for lip-synchronized three-dimensional animation” that was a significant improvement over computer-aided processes previously used in the industry.
In this case, the Federal Circuit will use the Mayo and Alice decisions to guide their ruling. The Mayo and Alice decisions set forth a two-step analysis for eligibility: First, the court must “determine whether the claims at issue are directed to” an ineligible “abstract idea, law of nature, or a natural phenomenon.” If so, the court must then consider the elements of each claim to determine whether they contain sufficient detail and additional limitations “to ensure that the patent in practice amounts to significantly more than a patent upon the [ineligible concept] itself.”
The lower court began its eligibility analysis in McRO v. Activision by noting that “[f]acially, these claims do not seem directed to an abstract idea. They are tangible, each covering an approach to automated three-dimensional computer animation, which is a specific technological process.” However, instead of stopping there and recognizing that the patents did not involve an “abstract idea,” the court proceeded to invalidate them based on its conclusion that the claims covered nothing significantly more than the abstract idea of “using a rules-based morph target approach” to accomplish “automatic lip synchronization for computer-generated 3D animation.”
As we argue in our brief, reaching this counterintuitive (and seemingly counterfactual) conclusion required fundamental errors in applying both steps of the Alice analysis.
Step One – Are the claims directed to an abstract idea?
The claims at issue are directed to a specific, practical and useful improvement to an existing technological process. Claim 1 of the ‘576 patent reads:
A method for automatically animating lip synchronization and facial expression of three-dimensional characters comprising:
obtaining a first set of rules that define output morph weight set stream as a function of phoneme sequence and time of said phoneme sequence;
An apparatus for automatically animating lip synchronization and facial expression of three-dimensional characters comprising:
obtaining a timed data file of phonemes having a plurality of sub-sequences; generating an intermediate stream of output morph weight sets and a plurality of transition parameters between two adjacent morph weight sets by evaluating said plurality of sub-sequences against said first set of rules;
generating a final stream of output morph weight sets at a desired frame rate from said intermediate stream of output morph weight sets and said plurality of transition parameters; and
applying said final stream of output morph weight sets to a sequence of animated characters to produce lip synchronization and facial expression control of said animated characters.
Clearly, this claim describes a concrete, real-world innovation that solves the difficult problem of accurately replicating the human face and speech in CGI and animation.
So how did the lower court conclude that it recites nothing more than an abstract idea? It did so by reversing the order of Alice’s two analytical steps and by collapsing them into a single inquiry.
Rather than first determining whether the claim as written was directed to an abstract idea and then assessing the claim’s “additional element” to determine whether they add significantly more to the idea, the court began by seeking to uncover the “abstract idea” lurking underneath the claim language by stripping away all elements that were known in the prior art in an attempt to discover the claims “point of novelty.”
Step Two – Does the claim contain additional elements that ensure the patent amounts to “significantly more” than the underlying abstract idea?
The lower court’s application of step-two is equally misguided and problematic. In step two of the Alice test, the court must assess whether the “additional elements” (i.e., any element beyond the abstract idea itself) places meaningful limitations on the scope of the claim.
In describing step two, the Supreme Court stated in Mayo that “well-understood, routine, conventional activity” previously used in the field “is normally not sufficient to transform an unpatentable [abstract idea] into a patent-eligible application . . . .” In other words, it is not generally “enough” simply to append routine, conventional steps – described at a high level of generality – to the abstract idea.
Unfortunately, the lower court fundamentally misinterprets this statement to mean that only novel elements (rather than all “additional elements”) should be considered for purposes of the “significantly more” analysis. The court then proceeds (yet again) to read all of the additional elements out of the claim because they lack sufficient novelty. Unsurprisingly, once all of the additional limitations recited in the claim are stripped away, all that is left is the abstract idea, leading the court to conclude that the claim fails the “significantly more” test.
This approach lacks any basis in the case law and ignores the fundamental difference between what is “known” in the prior art and what is “conventional” in industry practice. For something to be conventional it must not only be known, but widely-adopted. Put simply, the fact that space travel is “known” in human society by no means makes it a “conventional” practice.
Conflating these two concepts and disregarding any element that has a basis in the prior art makes it virtually impossible to satisfy step two. As the Supreme Court recognized in Mayo, “all inventions at some level embody, use, reflect, rest upon, or apply laws of nature, natural phenomena, or abstract ideas,” and as a result “too broad an interpretation” of these implicit exclusions from eligibility would “eviscerate patent law.”
The approach taken by the lower court would fulfill this dismal prophesy. As Judge Pfaelzer noted in a subsequent decision, “it is difficult to imagine any software patent that survives under McRO’s approach—most inventions today build on what is known in the art, and an improvement to software will almost inevitably be an algorithm or concept which, when viewed in isolation, will seem abstract. This analysis would likely render all software patents ineligible, contrary to Congress’s wishes.”
The Federal Circuit must be clear and decisive in nipping this in the bud. In deciding McRO, not only should they overrule the lower court’s erroneous conclusion, but they should take care to provide additional guidance regarding the correct application of the Alice test to avoid similar misapplication in other cases. This would provide much-needed clarity and certainty to patent holders and industries that rely on technology and software patents, shoring up our economic competitiveness and maintaining more than 2.5 million American jobs.
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BSA’s members include: Adobe, Altium, Apple, ANSYS, Autodesk, Bentley Systems, CA Technologies, CNC/Mastercam, Dell, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, Minitab, Oracle, PTC, salesforce.com, Siemens PLM Software, Symantec, Tekla, The MathWorks, and Trend Micro.
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Briefs Filed Thus Far: