District Court Throws Out Haptic Feedback Claims on Grounds of Patent Ineligible Subject Matter
Last week, Judge Koh of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California deemed claims relating to transmission of haptic messages to be directed to an abstract idea and therefore invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101.
The Plaintiff, Immersion Corp., alleged that Fitbit's wearable health and fitness devices infringe three of Immersion's patents, each of which involve "haptic" feedback technology -- namely, technology that provides forces, vibrations, or other motion feedback that recreates a sense of touch for a user. Fitbit filed a motion to dismiss contending that the asserted claims of each patent are patent ineligible under § 101. The District Court denied Fitbit's motion on two of the three patents, but granted the motion with respect to U.S. Patent No. 8,638,301 (the '301 patent).
The two patents at issue that survived the motion, U.S. Patent No. 8,059,105 (the '105 patent) and U.S. Patent No. 8,351,299 (the '299 patent), are directed to having touchscreens and touchpads provide haptic feedback in response to user input received via such touchscreens and touchpads, and having a toothbrush or other device provide haptic feedback in response to a mechanism sensing a condition (e.g., a threshold number of brush strokes being met, or a time period expiring), respectively. Claims that Immersion asserted as representative of the eligibility of each of these two patents are produced below:
U.S. Patent No. 8,059,105:
19. A haptic feedback device, comprising:
one or more processors configured to receive an input signal and generate a force signal based on the input signal, wherein the input signal is associated with a user-independent event, the user-independent event comprising one or more of a reminder event, an initiation of a task, a processing of the task, a conclusion of the task, a receipt of an email, or an event occurring in a game; and
one or more actuators configured to receive the force signal and impart a haptic effect based on the force signal.
U.S. Patent No. 8,351,299:
20. An apparatus comprising:
a housing;
a sensor coupled to the housing that senses motion of the housing and provides a sensor output based on if the sensed motion exceeds a predetermined threshold;
a timer coupled to the housing that measures at least one time period and provides a timer output on expiration of the at least one time period; and
a vibrotactile device that provides a haptic output based on the sensor output if the vibrotactile device receives the sensor output before the timer output and provides the haptic output based on the timer output if the vibrotactile device receives the timer output before the sensor output.
In contending the validity of the '105 patent, Fitbit argued that "[t]here is no purpose for the haptic effect beyond simply communicating to the user" (i.e., providing a notification to the user) that the claimed "user-independent" event occurred. Fitbit also argued that Immersion attempted to frame an abstract idea as a device claim, citing Alice in that "the mere presence of physical components in the claims is insufficient to confer patent eligibility."
But the District Court did not ignore the physical components of the claims, and in applying step one of the Alice framework, found the U.S. Supreme Court's Diehr decision and the Federal Circuit's Thales Visionix decision to be instructive. In particular, the District Court stated that characterizing claim 19 as being directed to the abstract idea of providing a notification (e.g., a haptic notification) "strays too far from the weight of the claim," and went on to give reasons why containing such an abstract idea was not enough to elevate the claim to a level of ineligibility:
The weight of the claim clearly focuses on a tangible, non-abstract device as the invention which, through the allegedly unconventional combination of components, contains the new and useful feature of notifying the device's user of independent events through vibration. See Thales Visionix, 850 F.3d at 1348-49; '105 patent at col. 1:64-col. 2:3 (noting that touchpads of the prior art lack haptic feedback); '105 patent at col. 12:61-67 (discussing scenario in which a user is notified of an event by vibration after having looked away from the screen). Indeed, a significant majority of the specification details various physical features of the claimed inventions, including different types of actuators and how an actuator can be coupled to the housing of the device. See '105 patent at col. 5:5-col. 12:49, col. 15:1-col. 16:17. The fact that part of the claim contains an abstract idea does not make the claim patent-ineligible under § 101. See Alice, 134 S. Ct. at 2354 ("[A]n invention is not rendered ineligible for patent simply because it involves an abstract concept.").
Further, the District Court found that "Immersion's invention of a touchpad or other similar device that provides haptic feedback is a new arrangement of known components that solves the problem of how to provide non-audio, non-visual notification to a user," and is thus patent-eligible. Finding step one of the Alice framework to be met, the District Court did not proceed to step two.
Next, the District Court addressed the '299 patent and again stopped their analysis after step one. Fitbit's arguments here were similar to the notification and physical component arguments noted above with respect to the '105 patent, but Fitbit also argued that providing a notification when a threshold has been reached is a well-known, fundamental practice. The District Court found these arguments to be unpersuasive for nearly the same reasons as the '105 patent, and analogized to Core Wireless in support of its conclusion:
Namely, characterizing claims 14 and 20 as directed to the abstract idea of [haptic] notification based on motion or a timer ignores the fact that the claimed invention is a tangible device comprising a new and useful arrangement of components that solves the problem of how to notify a user that a predetermined number of motions have occurred in an environment where audio or visual alerts would not be effective. See Thales Visionix, 850 F.3d at 1348-49. . . . Thus, because claim 14 and claim 20 disclose improvements in motion tracking devices, they are not directed to an abstract idea at step one, and the Court need not reach Alice step two. See Core Wireless, 880 F.3d at 1363; Thales Visionix, 850 F.3d at 1348-49.
The District Court then addressed the patent ineligibility of the '301 patent, whose claimed invention involves a mobile device transmitting a "haptic message" to another mobile device. The patent describes haptic messages as a useful form of non-linguistic communication that tie physical effects to a message, contrasting with more conventional messaging systems that may provide less or no contextual information associated with received and sent messages. For example, the patent describes a scenario in which one user appends a haptic signal simulating a heartbeat to a message, sends the message to the other user along with the haptic signal, which causes the other user's phone to vibrate in a manner that simulates the heartbeat pattern.
As a representative example of the asserted claims of the '301 patent, claim 27 is produced below:
27. A system comprising:
a processor configured to:
receive a first sensor signal from a first sensor, the first sensor configured to detect a movement of a first mobile device;
receive a second sensor signal from a second sensor, the second sensor configured to detect an interaction with the first mobile device;
receive a first data signal from a network interface, the network interface configured to receive signals transmitted by a second mobile device;
determine a change in a display signal based at least in part on the first data signal and the second sensor signal;
determine a haptic effect based at least in part on the first data signal; and
outputting the haptic effect.
Immersion asserted claim 27 as representative of the eligibility of this patent, but the District Court did not agree, finding the asserted claims of the patent invalid after addressing both steps of the Alice framework.
In addressing step one, the District Court concluded that claim 27 is directed to "receiving sensor and data signals, analyzing those signals, and outputting other signals in response," and therefore falls well within the Federal Circuit's abstract idea category of gathering and processing information. The District Court walked through the steps of the claim and cited primarily to the decisions in both Electric Power Group and West View Research, in each of which the Federal Circuit found claims to be directed to some form of receiving data, analyzing data, and generating a visual or audio response to the data. Ultimately, the District Court's decision on step one appeared to rest on how claim 27 did not recite more details regarding how to receive the signals, determine a change in display, and determine the haptic effect, and also did not recite more-detailed physical components involved in carrying out the recited acts.
The District Court's step one conclusion here is an interesting point of both contrast and comparison with the step one conclusions reached for the other two patents. All three patents more or less involve a haptic effect, though in contrast to claim 27, the eligible claims of the other two patents recited not only specific physical components (e.g., an actuator) included in the system, but also more detail as to how that system and its specific components processed the data and performed other acts that lead to deliverance of the haptic effect. Despite acknowledging that the act of the processor "outputting the haptic effect" likely involves transmitting a signal to an actuator to cause the actuator to output the haptic effect, the District Court still found claim 27 to be directed to the abstract idea noted above:
Transmitting a signal to an actuator does not make the focus of the claim any less abstract because outputting a signal is no more than the transmission of data. Similarly, the Federal Circuit has held that displaying the results of collecting and analyzing information, without more, "is abstract as an ancillary part of such collection and analysis." [citations omitted]
With respect to step two, Immersion contended that the claim's inventive aspects include generating graphical and haptic feedback in response to exchanged messages was inventive, but the District Court disagreed, emphasizing again the lack of inventive detail in the claims:
The mobile devices, network interface, processor, and haptic feedback system are, in broad terms, generic, conventional components. The specification confirms that these are generic components. . . . Nothing about the claim or specification suggests that the way these steps are accomplished are anything but generic -- as explained above, the claims recite these steps only functionally and require no inventive algorithm or data structure for performing them.
Finally, the District Court distinguished claim 27 from the claim the Federal Circuit addressed in BASCOM, and instead analogized to the Federal Circuit decisions in both Electric Power Group and TDE Petroleum in finding that the ordered combination of elements did not bring the claim out of the realm of data collection/analysis and was recited no differently than the "ordinary order" in which data collection/analysis elements would appear.
Given the state of the asserted claims -- especially that of claim 27, compared with the other two patents -- the District Court's finding here is relatively unsurprising. Again, it appears as though the lack of detailed physical components and detailed algorithms is what doomed the '301 patent.
