Last week, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued an opinion in Koninklijke KPN N.V. v. Gemalto M2M GMBH, 2018-1863, -1864, -1865 (Nov. 15, 2019), reversing a district court’s grant of judgment that claims 2-4 of the asserted patent were ineligible.
Plaintiff Koninklijke sued Gemalto and others for infringement of its patent directed to a device for error checking data transmitted over a communications channel. “Check data” is a shorthand representation of a particular block of original data. Comparing check data generated at the originating and receiving ends of a data transmission allows the system to infer whether errors occurred during transmission. The defendants moved for judgment on the pleadings that the asserted claims were patent ineligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The district court granted the motion. Koninklijke appealed as to claims 2-4.
The Federal Circuit reversed. The Court first noted that patent eligibility is a question of law that may contain underlying facts, and that it reviews the ultimate conclusion on patent eligibility de novo. Applying the two-step Alice framework for evaluating eligibility, the Court first looked at “‘whether the claims at issue are directed to a patent-ineligible concept’ such as an abstract idea.” In assessing this step one of Alice, the Court explained that it looks “at the focus of the claimed advance over the prior art to determine if the claim’s character as a whole is directed to excluded subject matter.” In cases involving software innovations, the Court explained, the inquiry often comes down to whether the claims focus on a “specific asserted improvement in computer capabilities” or on a process that uses computers merely as a tool. Applying that framework, the Court concluded that the claims at issue on appeal are patent eligible because they are directed to a non-abstract improvement in existing technological processes. Specifically, the Court explained the claims recite “a specific implementation of varying the way check data is generated that improves the ability of prior art error detection systems to detect systematic errors.” Having concluded at step one of Alice that the claims on appeal were not directed to patent ineligible subject matter, the Court did not reach step two.