Bonum Certa Men Certa

From PTAB Bashing to Federal Circuit (CAFC) Bashing: How the Patent 'Industry' Sells Software Patents

No, the patent microcosm needs no facts, only innuendo!

Judge Reyna



Summary: The latest tactics of the patent microcosm are just about as distasteful as last month's (or last year's), with focus shifting to the courts and few broadly-misinterpreted patent cases (mainly Finjan, Berkheimer, and Aatrix)

IN OUR previous post we explained how buzzwords were being used by both the EPO and USPTO to allow some software patents. This isn't good, but one must remember that a patent being granted by a patent office isn't the final stop; courts too must examine and rule on the matter, but only if it reaches the courts (i.e. not a settlement out of court or 'protection' money).



US courts have become very hostile (albeit understandably and suitably -- as per the law -- hostile) towards software patents. This really, really upsets patent zealots such as IAM and Watchtroll. They seem to have shifted attention away from PTAB and mostly to CAFC, whose judges they are bashing and credibility/legitimacy they question. It's disgusting because we recently saw even racial smears against Judge Reyna.

Watchtroll used to bash PTAB almost every day -- sometimes several times per day -- but gone are those days. Several days ago they wrote about the Zeidman lawsuit over "optimizing software code to run on a modern space processor [...] Zeidman was informed that the funding topic was seeking a software tool or tool suite capable of converting high level software languages like C++ or Matlab into a hardware description language (HDL)."

Watchtroll has always been a loud proponent of software patents; so isn't it a shame that nobody there (with very rare exceptions) even understands how programming works? The founder got so upset when questioned about it that he blocked me in Twitter. He had made a fool of himself, making contradictory statements and showing that he hasn't the faintest of clue what computer programs are (he thinks a Web page is a computer program, for instance, not hypertext).

About a week or two late Watchtroll wrote about the 'car parts' case and yesterday it mentioned Judge Reyna in the context of a case from last week (not about patent scope). The gist:

SimpleAir, Inc. v. Google LLC, No. 2016-2738, 2018 (Fed. Cir. Mar. 12, 2018) (Before Lourie, Reyna, and Chen, J.) (Opinion for the court, Lourie, J.)

The Federal Circuit vacated a district court order dismissing SimpleAir’s complaint as barred by claim preclusion and the Kessler doctrine, and remanded for further proceedings.


Days earlier a patent maximalism site, Patent Docs, cherry-picked a rarity: reversal on €§ 101 grounds (Mayo and Alice) at CAFC.

The Federal Circuit affirmed the decision on €§ 101, reversed denial of JMOL on infringement of the '685 patent, vacated judgment for damages as a result of its decision on '685 patent infringement, and remanded for the District Court to recalculate damages, in a decision by Judge Moore joined by Judge Bryson; Judge Hughes dissented.

The majority set forth the now canonical two-prong test for subject matter eligibility under Mayo and Alice: the claims need to be "directed to" a law of nature, natural phenomenon or abstract idea, and there must be "something more" amounting to an "inventive concept" that is not merely "routine, conventional, and well-understood" in the prior art. Here, the majority spends little time on the first prong, accepting without comment that the claimed invention is dependent on the "natural law" that body temperature can be measured from skin temperature at the forehead. The District Court had relied on Diamond v. Diehr, 450 U.S. 175 (1981), for the principle that claims can recite "additional steps" that "transformed the underlying natural laws into inventive methods and useful devices that noninvasively and accurately detect human body temperature." These steps, which included "(1) moving while laterally scanning ('685 patent claims 7, 14, and 17; '938 patent claims 17, 24, 33, 60, and 66); (2) obtaining a peak temperature reading ('685 patent claim 7; '938 patent claims 60 and 66); and (3) obtaining at least three readings per second ('938 patent claims 17, 24, 39, 40, 46, and 49)" were known in the prior art but that was not enough. According to the District Court "simply being known in the art did not suffice to establish that the subject matter was not eligible for patenting" because "a new combination of steps in a process may be patentable even though all the constituents of the combination were well known and in common use before the combination was made," citing Diehr. The distinction (and in some ways the distinction missing from much of €§ 101 jurisprudence post-Mayo) is that these methods were used for a different purpose in the prior art, in this case detecting "hot spots" indicative of tumors, fractures, or other injuries (and in at least some testimony, used in horses not humans). In addition, the invention here newly provided a "calculated coefficient for translating measurements taken at the forehead into core body temperature readings" which was not routine, well understood or conventional in the prior art.


Notice how none of these cases can really change anything. So patent lawyers reject reality, manipulate law, and latch onto imaginary things. Here we have boosters from Fenwick & West writing about the 'vibrations' case (covered here before). They continue to nitpick decisions and try to warp reality against Alice et al (decisions similar to it), borrowing from very old CAFC rulings, e.g.:

I have not spent too much time trying to determine whether the court here accurately applied the tests mandated by Alice, Mayo and their progeny. My discomfort comes from the specific result (that the claims are not, as a whole directed to patent eligible subject matter) more than the general result (patent invalidity) or the path to it. At bottom, all inventions work because of the physics, math, etc. governing their structure and operation. The claims here seem directed, as a whole, to the manufacture of automotive drive shafts. It seems certain to me that even a few years ago, it would have been unthinkable to challenge such a claim on Section 101 grounds. Was the patent bar really that disconnected from the statute for the past century? Is the sea change brought on by Bilski, Alice and Mayo based not on difficult questions brought on by the nature of information age inventions but instead on a longstanding, fundamental misunderstanding of the statutory statement of what our patent system is intended to protect?


Not to our shock, other patent maximalists still hope to make of Berkheimer something that it isn't (explanation in [1, 2] among other posts of ours). Patently-O mentioned it again the other day:

The case has good shot at being heard by the whole court. I expect that the court would agree with Judge Moore that underlying factual issues are possible in the eligibility analysis, the exercise is not “a predominately factual one that ‘opens the door in both steps of the Alice inquiry for the introduction of an inexhaustible array of extrinsic evidence, such as prior art, publications, other patents, and expert opinion.'” (HP Petition, quoting Judge Reyna’s dissent in Aatrix).


No cartoon of Judge Reyna this time around, for 'daring' to express dissent (in Aatrix). Watchtroll is still bringing up Aatrix. Yes, yet again as an excuse to assert (again!) that there's another route for avoiding rejection of a software patent. This is nonsensical.

Then that's that old Finjan case from January -- a case in which all patents except one were discarded, causing a great deal of commotion among patent maximalists.

Sara O'Connell (Pillsbury’s Internet & Social Media Law Blog/Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP) recalled this old case, which she pushed out as a "press release" and an 'article' (another example of infomercials, like those we referred to earlier today). To quote:

Finjan Inc. owns patents on technology involving computer and network security. Its patents are directed toward behavior-based internet security, addressing a method of “identifying, isolating, and neutralizing” potentially malicious code based on the behavior of that code rather than by scanning and maintaining a list of known viruses and malicious code signatures like so many other providers of internet security software.


Finjan was also mentioned in this other infomercial from a few days ago. To quote:

Patent claims serve to provide notice as to the scope of an invention described in a patent. The claims can be directed to various statutory types, such as an apparatus, article, composition, method, system, or any other patentable subject matter.

[...]

CRM claims combine the functionality of method claims with the tangibility of apparatus claims: they recite operations typically provided in a method while being directed to a physical memory having instructions that are executable to cause such operations. Accordingly, whereas it is uncertain whether a method can be “sold,” “offered for sale,” or “imported” for purposes of infringement under €§ 271, the Federal Circuit has held that CRMs can be. For example, in Finjan v. Secure Computing Corp., the Federal Circuit affirmed that the defendant infringed the plaintiff’s CRM claims because the defendant had “sold” an infringing software product.[14] And while each step of a method must actually be performed in the United States to be infringed, the court in Finjan did not require that the instructions stored in the infringing CRM actually be executed. The court reasoned that, “to infringe a claim that recites capability and not actual operation, an accused device ‘need only be capable of operating’ in the described mode.”[15] Thus, CRM claims can operate like apparatus claims for purposes of an infringement analysis.


It's worth noting that all they ever mention is Finjan, Berkheimer, and Aatrix (nothing from 2017). But as we pointed out many times before (in more than a dozen articles), none of this triplet can be considered a real challenge to Section 101 and nothing at all last year even came close to that. Nothing has really changed, except the frequency of infomercials that try to 'poach' customers; they used to bash PTAB a lot and now they just basically cherry-pick CAFC cases and argue that they can miraculously enforce software patents. They cannot.

Recent Techrights' Posts

We Are Safe in a Modern "Tech" Society, Right?
People are safer if they control their own computing
The Way Things Are Going, They May Soon Stop Saying "Web Address" and Instead Say "Chrome Address"
The Web isn't built or based around open Web standards anymore. It's centered around user-agent.
Microsoft as a Golden Cage
"I was laid off by Microsoft and can't find a job. I'm weeks away from giving up my apartment and moving across the country to live with family."
Weekend Discussion About How IBM's Bluewashing of Red Hat Will Cause "Enshittification" for Users
"I worked at a software company that was acquired by IBM so I knew it was game over for RedHat the day they were acquired"
Brett Wilson LLP Getting Sued by Its Very Own Clients, a Legal Story That Has Made the Mainstream News (Law360)
Law360 or Law.com are about as mainstream as one can get in that "sector" (litigation 'industry')
Lucas Nussbaum & Debian pregnancy cluster
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
 
The Same People Who Attacked Richard Stallman (RMS) Are Attacking Daniel Pocock to Discourage People From Listening to His Information
Pocock is being demonised for the same reasons and by the same people who attack RMS
Your Typical Anti-Richard Stallman (RMS) Cancellist
"About the RMS cancellation"
Richard Stallman (RMS) Has Announced His Talk in Rome Less Than 20 Hours in Advance (and on a Sunday)
Why did he wait until the night before?
GNU Tools Cauldron Event in Portugal: Videos Now Available via Invidious
Go have a look
Slopwatch: GNU/Linux Sites That Became Slopfarms and Spamfarms
The Web is a mess and "Linux" or "Ubuntu" sites became part of the problem
Richard Stallman's Talk 25 Hours Away, Aula Magna Palazzo del Rettorato (CU001), Sapienza Università di Roma (Piazzale Aldo Moro, 5)
The talk is 25 hours away and we see some QR code for it
Gemini Links 12/10/2025: Watches, the Depression of 2026, Gamboling with Odds
Links for the day
Links 12/10/2025: 'False' DMCA Claims and Slop Facing Perils Again (the Hype Wears Off)
Links for the day
Microsoft Has Just Lost Privacy Case in Austria and Its Latest Moves Make a Complete Ban Seem Imperative
Microsoft is not a software company, it's a spying agency that uses software to collect data
The Register MS: Microsoft is the Security Expert, Not the Prime Culprit, So Buy More Microsoft
This front page feature is devoid of any actual substance, it's just Microsoft copypasta
Paris 'Love Nest' & Debian Outreachy: from Lycée Lakanal to ENS Cachan, Cr@ns, nepotism
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Stefano Zacchiroli (Zack) & Debian pregnancy cluster
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 12/10/2025: "Palm Computering", Further Exploration of Slide Rules, and Key Takeaways from The Well-Grounded Rubyist
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, October 11, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, October 11, 2025
Tomorrow: Founder of the Free Software Foundation and of GNU/Linux, Richard Stallman, Speaks in Roma (Rome), Italy at 4PM
GNU/Linux is more important than ever in this dystopian world
Microsoft and Apple Are Rare Topics in Geminispace
in Geminispace it's rather safe to assume everyone is into BSD, GNU/Linux, and sometimes retro
Qualcomm and Manchester United Appear to Have Dumped Microsoft (Qualcomm Now Invests More in Linux, Apparently)
It's a relief to no longer see Microsoft logos and brands on a local football club's gear (I'm not a Manchester United fan, but not a foe either)
As Guest of Honour in Rome, Founder of the Free Software Foundation to Speak ("Distinguished Lecture") After Introduction by Leonardo Querzoni
Happy hacking...
All Things Open is Proprietary
The OSI has become a front group of proprietary software openwashers, led and sponsored by proprietary giants
When Microsoft Lays Off Lots of Workers They Say It "Invests in AI" (a Lie), Now It's "Reshuffles" or "Microsoft Tightens"
Microsoft "news" by bots
"I saw Richard Stallman give a talk in the mid 80s, which began my fear and loathing of software patents" and "Richard Stallman was always right."
"By betraying the legacy of our ancestors, we’ve set ourselves on a path toward self-destruction — moral, intellectual, economic, and ultimately biological."
There Were Several Waves of Microsoft Shanghai Layoffs in 2025, Western Media Continues to Turn a Blind Eye to Chinese Layoffs of an Epic Scale
Sometimes select Taiwanese news sites (published in English) or automated translations are all we have
Brett Wilson LLP Spreads Trumpism to the United Kingdom, Looking to Profit From 'Legal Colonialism' (Overriding Sovereignty)
There's growing recognition of this conundrum worldwide
The Demise of Shopping in Person
In a world like this, how valued is the customer?
This Past Friday, "Nearly 700 People Came to Listen to RMS!" (Richard Stallman)
"Nearly 700 people came to listen to RMS!"
Distinguished Lecture by Richard Stallman This Coming Monday in Rome
After "Free software, Crucial for Freedom in a Digital World"
Slopwatch: UbuntuPIT Churning Out Plagiarism and the Slopfarm LinuxSecurity Turns to Pseudonyms
Our hunch is, UbuntuPIT will sooner or later realise that this toxic approach is just harming UbuntuPIT and tainting the reputation of past articles
The Lawsuit by Clients of Brett Wilson LLP Against Brett Wilson LLP is Officially On, It is Progressing, The 'Experts' Pick Outside Law Firms (RPC and Mills & Reeve) to Spare Them From Litigants in Person
So it is probably quite potent
Gemini Links 11/10/2025: Nyctography, Gerrymandering, and Lurking
Links for the day
The 'Culture Wars' in Free Software Have Gone Out of Control
Social control media amplifies such utterly infantile discourse
Teaser: To Compensate for the Fact Our Clients Are Terrible Human Beings Who Strangle Women (While on Microsoft's Payroll) and We Get Paid by Mystery Parties We Bombard You and Your Wife With Almost 10 Kilograms of Legal Papers
If you can't win an argument, then drown the other side with papers?
Links 11/10/2025: World Mental Health Day 2025, Another European Legal Defeat for Microsoft 360
Links for the day
MIT Technology Review is Part-Time SPAMfarm of Billionaires and Mega-Corporations
Does MIT operate its own "b2b" SPAMfarm?
Open Source Initiative Executive Director Leaves, Replacement Sought by Monopolists, Not the Community or OSI Members
Serves to show who runs this show...
Links 11/10/2025: China-US Tensions Grow Again, "Hey Hi" More Widely Recognised as Bubble Made of Capital That Doesn't Exist
Links for the day
Now Confirmed in Western Media: Microsoft Azure Layoffs This Month
Affirmed by more sources moments ago
Peter O'Callaghan QC represented grandparents, Westernport Hotel, at Liquor Royal Commission
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Either The Register MS Divests From FOSS Coverage or Liam Proven is on Long Holiday
Publishers perish when their audience loses trust in them
Microsoft Cancelling Another Datacentre is a Sign of Financial Trouble and Lack of Growth
The debt continues to grow
Gemini Links 11/10/2025: An Evening at the Fair and Fast Fourier Friday
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, October 10, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, October 10, 2025
Geminispace is Very Large
The word continues to spread and the number of participants grows
Another Wave of Microsoft Layoffs, This Time During National Day Holiday
This time it's China again
10 Out of 10: RMS Attracts Massive Audience in Göteborg, Sweden (All Seats Occupied, Some People Standing)
a 55-second clip of his talk
Staying Happy in Times of Crackdowns on Civil Society
Optimism in this sort of "new reality" or "new normal" seems like something for the irrational person
"Nobel" Exploited Posthumously for "AI" Hype, Now They Do the Same With "Quantum"
ere have been many jokes about "Nobel" for peace (often granted to pro-war people) and a fake one for "Economics" (establishment propaganda)
Slopwatch: Plagiarism and "Linux" Articles by Bots
Sites that do this won't survive; many of them rely on slop services (suppliers) that will cease to exist after the bubble bursts
Links 10/10/2025: Putin Admits Russia Downed Azerbaijan Airlines Jet, More New Heat Records
Links for the day
Noteworthy Claim That IBM is Firing a Lot of Lawyers This Week (RAs in the Legal Department)
A lot of what they do is patent 'trolling' or lawyering up against their own staff (e.g. HR disputes)
Links 10/10/2025: US Judge Bars Attacks by ICE On Journalists and Protesters; “We Took The Freedom of Speech Away” Says the President
Links for the day
Slopwatch: Serial Sloppers, Google News Gifting Slopfarms, and Fake News/Plagiarism About "Linux"
Google itself is a slop pusher these days
Qualcomm, the New Owner of Arduino, Blasted for Its Software Patents Tax on 'Smartphones'
A lot of Qualcomm's patents are on software. We wrote about this in prior years.
XBox Layoffs Rumours, Downtime, and Criticism From XBox Co-Founder
"everyone is ditching the xbox."
Links 10/10/2025: Honoring The Legacy Of Robert Murray-Smith, Many Articles on the Hey Hi (AI) Bubble
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/10/2025: October Gothic and Reading Middle Earth Role Playing; C and Ada
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 09, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, October 09, 2025