For the second time in two months, the Federal Circuit has issued a decision that describes a situation in which a software invention can be eligible for patenting.
In Bascom Global Internet Services, Inc. v. AT&T Mobility et al., the court vacated and remanded a district court’s decision that found a content filtering system invention to be not patent-eligible.
The patent at issue covered a system by which a remote ISP server filters content that a client computer requests from a website. Claim 1 of the patent is directed to:
1. A content filtering system for filtering content retrieved from an Internet computer network by individual controlled access network accounts, said filtering system comprising:
a local client computer generating network access requests for said individual controlled access network accounts;
at least one filtering scheme;
a plurality of sets of logical filtering elements; and
a remote ISP server coupled to said client computer and said Internet computer network, said ISP server associating each said network account to at least one filtering scheme and at least one set of filtering elements, said ISP server further receiving said network access requests from said client computer and executing said associated filtering scheme utilizing said associated set of logical filtering elements.
The Federal Circuit passed on considering whether the claims were directed to an abstract idea, but instead focused on the second prong of the Alice v CLS Bank patent-eligibility analysis and found the claims to include an inventive concept. The Federal Circuit noted that “[t]he claims do not merely recite the abstract idea of filtering content along with the requirement to perform it on the Internet, or perform it on a set of generic computer components…nor do the claims preempt all ways of filtering content on the Internet; rather, they recite a specific, discrete implementation of the abstract idea of filtering content.”
The court also cautioned against confusing patent-eligibility with obviousness: “The district court’s analysis in this case … looks similar to an obviousness analysis under 35 U.S.C. 103, except lacking an explanation of a reason to combine the limitations as claimed. The inventive concept inquiry requires more than recognizing that each claim element, by itself, was known in the art. As is the case here, an inventive concept can be found in the non-conventional and non-generic arrangement of known, conventional pieces.”
The decision closely follows the Federal Circuit’s recent decision in Enfish LLC v. Microsoft Corporation, in which the court cautioned against a broad interpretation of Alice v. CLS Bank as holding that all improvements in computer-related technology are inherently abstract.
For a summary of more Federal Circuit, district court, and PTAB decisions that have found software patents to be eligible for patenting since Alice, click here.
Thanks to my colleague Brienne Terril for her help writing this post.
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