Intellectual Property Law Blog

Enfish v. Microsoft

On May 12, 2016, the Fed. Cir. in Enfish, LLC v. Microsoft Corp. (Fed. Cir. 2016) reversed a summary judgment holding that the claims of U.S. Patent No. 6,151,604 (the “‘604 Patent”) and the U.S. Patent No. 6,163,775 (the “‘775 Patent”) lack patent-eligibility under 35 USC §101. The ‘604 and ‘775 Patents, which shared a common specification, were both directed to “an innovative logical model for a computer database.” “A logical model,” the Court stated, “is a model of data for a computer database explaining how the various elements of information are related to one another.” Unlike conventional logical models, however, the ‘604 and ‘775 Patents disclosed a “self-referential” logical model that includes “all data entries in a single table, with column definitions provided by rows in that same table.” In other words, when storing multiple types of entities (objects) in a database, instead of creating a separate table for…
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Review of Some 2016 Court Decisions Rejecting an Alice Challenge

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank has undoubtedly had a significant impact on the patent landscape for software patents. The two-part test laid out in Alice has resulted in a large number of patents being invalidated. However, a number of patents have also survived the test, providing some guidance on the types of claims that would be patent eligible. Under the two-part Alice test, courts examine (1) whether the patent at issue is directed to a patent ineligible concept (e.g. abstract ideas) and, if yes, courts then inquire into (2) whether the patent at issue includes “an inventive concept that is sufficient to ensure that the patent in practice amounts to significantly more than a patent upon the [ineligible concept] itself.” In one of our recent newsletters, we wrote about three patents, prosecuted by Farjami & Farjami LLP, that passed muster under Alice in Modern…
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Three Patents Survive the Alice Test (Modern Telecom Systems LLC v. Lenovo Inc.)

The Court Finds Three Pre-Alice Patents Prosecuted by Farjami & Farjami LLP Pass the Alice Test:   The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California recently found three patents belonging to Modern Telecom Systems LLC (“MTS”), and originally owned by Conexant Systems, Inc. (“Conexant”), not to be patent-ineligible under the Alice/Mayo framework. Modern Telecom Systems LLC v. Lenovo Inc., CV 14-1266-DOC (C.D. Cal. 2015). At issue, among others, was U.S. Patent No. 6,570,932 (the “‘932 Patent”), which the parties referred to as the “Power Level Calculation Patent.” Also at issue were U.S. Patent No. 6,332,009 (the “‘009 Patent”) and U.S. Patent No. 6,504,886 (the “‘886 Patent”), which the parties referred to as the “Learning Sequence Patents.” The three patents at issue had been prosecuted by Farjami & Farjami LLP for Conexant, a leading contributor to the ITU-T modem standards, such as the ITU-T V.90 and V.92 modem standards….
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