With the eligibility rubric of Alice v. CLS Bank, an applicant/patentee must navigate a minefield of pre-issuance and post-issuance validity challenges under 35 U.S.C. § 101 in order to obtain and enforce a patent.

First, through clever drafting, the applicant must convince a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) examiner to not raise a § 101 rejection during prosecution.  If one is raised, the applicant has to persuade the examiner, through amendment or argument, to withdraw it.  If the examiner remains unpersuaded, an appeal to the USPTO's Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) must serve that function.  Failing that, appeals to the Federal Circuit (which applies a highly-unpredictable eligibility analysis) and even the Supreme Court (which has not found a patent eligible since 1981) are possible.  To be fair, it is unlikely that the high Court will grant certiorari on a § 101 issue these days, as we have recently seen.

Once issued, the patent might be able to be pulled back into the PTAB for a Post-Grant Review (PGR) or a Covered Business Method (CBM) Review.  In addition to that, enforcement proceedings in a district court can subject the patent to further invalidity challenges under § 101 on the pleadings and at summary judgment.  If the district court's § 101 decision is appealed, the patent then has to survive said eligibility analysis of the Federal Circuit, the decision of which could potentially be further appealed to the Supreme Court with said unlikely chance of being heard.

Only once these avenues have been exhausted can the patentee relax and use the surviving patent to enjoin a party from practicing the claimed invention or to seek damages therefrom without the specter of § 101 hanging over the proceedings (this specter is one of stock horror-movie fare -- pale complexion, chunks of missing flesh, sharp claws -- quite non-abstract, if you will).  And yes, the patent also has to be found novel, non-obvious, properly specified, and infringed.

Clearly, an entity seeking an enforceable patent to protect its innovations from copyists and free-riders has a few hurdles to overcome.  Perhaps this would not be a terrible conundrum if the law surrounding patent eligibility was clear.  But it is not.  Don't take my word for it -- read what others more knowledgeable and eloquent have written.

In any event, iLife sued Nintendo in the Northern District of Texas for allegedly infringing U.S. Patent No. 6,864,796.  At issue were the latter's Wii and Wii U motion control wands known as "Wiimotes".

As described by the Court:

The '796 patent generally discloses a system for evaluating body movement relative to an environment.  The system includes a sensor that detects dynamic and static accelerative phenomena of the body.  The sensor senses one or more absolute values, changes in value, or some combination of the same and generates an output signal to [a] processor.  The processor then evaluates the signal to determine whether the body is in an acceptable or unacceptable state.  The patent describes acceptable or unacceptable as within or beyond tolerance.

Regarding the patent, claim 1 was front and center in the accusation of infringment.  It recites:

A system within a communications device capable of evaluating movement of a body relative to an environment, said system comprising:
    a sensor, associable with said body, that senses dynamic and static accelerative phenomena of said body, and
    a processor, associated with said sensor, that processes said sensed dynamic and static accelerative phenomena as a function of at least one accelerative event characteristic to thereby determine whether said evaluated body movement is within environmental tolerance
    wherein said processor generates tolerance indicia in response to said determination; and
    wherein said communication device transmits said tolerance indicia.

The case went to trial and the jury found that Nintendo infringed claim 1, awarding iLife slightly over $10 million in damages.  The jury also found the patent to be not invalid on grounds of purportedly lacking adequate written description and enablement.

Nintendo moved for a judgment as a matter of law, arguing that claim 1 is invalid under § 101, indefinite, and lacks adequate written description and enablement.  We will focus on the eligibility dispute.

In Alice, the Supreme Court set forth a two-part test to determine whether claims are directed to patent-eligible subject matter under § 101.  One must first decide whether the claim at hand involves a judicially-excluded law of nature, a natural phenomenon, or an abstract idea.  If so, then one must further decide whether any element or combination of elements in the claim is sufficient to ensure that the claim amounts to significantly more than the judicial exclusion.  But elements or combinations of elements that are well-understood, routine, and conventional will not lift the claim over the § 101 hurdle.  While this inquiry is generally carried out as a matter of law, factual issues can come into play when determining whether something is well-understood, routine, and conventional.

Applying part one of Alice, the Court found that, not unlike the Federal Circuit decision of Electric Power Group v. Alstom S.A., claim 1 was "directed to the abstract idea of gathering, processing, and transmitting . . . information."  Further, the type of information at play -- dynamic and static accelerative phenomena -- did not render the claim any less abstract.  The Court also noted that "[n]othing in claim 1, understood in light of the specification, requires anything other than conventional sensors and processors performing conventional activities previously known to the industry."  Indeed, the Court cited to such an admission in the specification.

The Court also considered whether the claim involved an improvement to its recited hardware.  Ultimately, the Court concluded that it did not, finding that "the claim does not disclose any improvement in the sensor's ability to collect information, such as collecting previously unknown information or collecting information more accurately [and] it does not disclose some improvement in the processor itself, such as faster or more powerful processing."  Further, the claim "is not limited to any particular configuration of the components that results in a technological improvement . . . [i]nstead, the sensor and processor are merely tools to execute an abstract idea."

Finding claim 1 abstract, the Court moved on to part two of Alice.  Unsurprisingly, the claim fared poorly, with the Court rapidly concluding that "[t]here is no inventive concept in the claim elements, whether considered individually or as an ordered combination . . . [and it] does not add any meaningful limitations to the routine steps of data collection, analysis, and transmission using conventional computer components."

Particularly, "[c]laim 1 requires neither a new source or type of information nor a new method of measuring information [and] provides for an unspecified set of rules for analyzing sensor data, but discloses no further details on those rules, like how data might be evaluated for a child versus an adult."  The Court even used iLife's own claim construction argument that claim 1 "does not contain words requiring any special type of processing" against it.

iLife argued that, in its specification, "the claimed processor distinguishes between normal and abnormal accelerative events, and, when an abnormal event is identified, to indicate whether the abnormal event is tolerable, or within tolerance" as well as distinguishing "other physical characteristics, including temperature, pressure, force, sound, light, relative position, and the like."  But the Court observed that the claim itself does not contain these details or limitations, and therefore does not satisfy part two of the test.

Consequently, the Court ruled the '796 patent invalid under § 101 as a matter of law, effectively rendering the jury verdict moot.

For anyone following § 101 jurisprudence, a quick glance at claim 1 was probably enough to provide an educated guess for which way the Court was going to rule.  Recent § 101 opinions from the Federal Circuit have repeated found that claims lacking in technical detail -- ones that recite what an invention does rather than how the invention accomplishes its goals -- are generally abstract.  This is not the dictionary definition of the word "abstract," but instead a legal fiction that a concrete and tangible invention can be invalid if it is defined in terms of its outcome rather than the process used to achieve that outcome.

Despite there being no inkling of this notion in § 101 of the patent statute and questionable support in the Supreme Court's cases, the post-Alice Federal Circuit has morphed patent-eligibility into a game in which one must guess the level of detail required for an invention to cross over from "abstract" to "non-abstract."  If anything, such considerations are best addressed under §§ 102, 103, and 112 -- the parts of the statute where over-broad claim language can be considered in a more cogent fashion.  But with the Alice hammer all claims look like nails, so here we are.  And the § 101 minefield becomes even more hazardous.

iLife Technologies, Inc. v. Nintendo of America, Inc. (N.D. Tex. 2020)
Order by Chief Judge Lynn