Federal Circuit’s Internal Debate of Eligibility Continues
Patent – Patently-O 2016-11-13
Amdocs v. Openet (Fed. Cir. 2016)
In the end, I don’t know how important Amdocs will be, but it offers an interesting split decision on the eligibility of software patent claims. Senior Judge Plager and Judge Newman were in the majority — finding the claims eligible — with Judge Reyna in dissent. One takeaway is that the Federal Circuit continues to be divided on the issues. By luck-of-the-panel in this case, the minority on the court as a whole were the majority on the panel (pushing against Alice & Mayo). Going forward, the split can be reconciled by another Supreme Court opinion, a forceful Federal Circuit en banc decision, or perhaps by future judicial appointments by President Trump. I expect 2-3 vacancies on the court during Trump’s first term.
In a 2014 post I described the Amdocs district court decision invalidating the claims. The four patents at issue all stem from the same original application relating to a software and network structure for computing the bill for network communications usage. One benefit imparted by the invention is associated with its physically distributed architecture that “minimizes the impact on network and system resources” by allowing “data to reside close to the information sources.” According to the majority opinion, “each patent explains that this is an advantage over prior art systems that stored information in one location, which made it difficult to keep up with massive record flows from the network devices and which required huge databases.” The nexus with the tated benefit is difficult to find in many of the claims themselve. See Claim 1 below, which was taken as representative of the asserted claims of Amdocs ‘065 patent:
1. A computer program product embodied on a computer readable storage medium for processing network accounting information comprising:
computer code for receiving from a first source a first network accounting record;
computer code for correlating the first network accounting record with accounting information available from a second source; and
computer code for using the accounting information with which the first network accounting record is correlated to enhance the first network accounting record.
You’ll note that the claim is an almost pure software claim — requiring “computer code” “embodied on a computer readable storage medium.” The code has three functions: (1) receiving a network accounting record; (2) correlating the record with additional accounting information; and (3) using the accounting information to “enhance” the original network accounting record. The claim term “enhance” is construed narrowly than you might imagine as the addition of one or more fields to the record. An example of an added field would be a user’s name that might be added to the accounting record that previously used a numeric identifier. The court also found that the term “enhance” should be interpreted as requiring that – and doing so in a “a distributed fashion … close to their sources” rather than at a centralized location. This narrow interpretation of the term “enhance” do not flow naturally from the claim language, but do turn out to be crucial to the outcome.
In reviewing the claim, the court noted that “somewhat facially-similar claims” have been alternatively invalidated as abstract ideas and found eligible. Compare, for example, Digitech with Enfish and DDR. Here, the court wrote that the claims are “much closer” to the ones found eligible. I might rewrite their opinion to say that the judges in the majority prefer the decisions finding eligibility over those invalidating software patent claims.
The two recent Supreme Court cases of Alice and Mayo spell out the court’s two-step framework for determining whether a patent is improperly directed to one of the excluded categories of abstract ideas, natural phenomena, and laws of nature. Briefly, the court first determines whether “the claims at issue are directed to one of those patent-ineligible concepts.” If so, the decision-maker must then determine whether any particular elements in the claim “transform the nature of the claim into a patent-eligible application.” This second step requires consideration of additional elements both individually and in combination in search for an “inventive concept . . . sufficient to ensure that the patent in practice amounts to significantly more than a patent upon the [ineligible concept] itself.” [Quoting Mayo and Alice throughout].
In making its eligibility conclusion in Amdocs, the appellate majority focused on the claim requirement (as construed) that processing be done in a distributed fashion. According to the court, “enhancing data in a distributed fashion” is “an unconventional technological solution . . . to a technological problem (massive record flows which previously required massive databases).” Remember here though that we are not talking about patenting a distributed system, but rather patenting a “computer program product embodied on a computer readable storage medium” used to implement the features.
Rather than taking Alice/Mayo steps in turn, the majority accepted “for argument’s sake” that the claims were directed to abstract ideas. However, the claim adds “something more” beyond an abstract idea. Here, the court notes that the claims require “distributed architecture—an architecture providing a technological solution to a technological problem. This provides the requisite ‘something more’ than the performance of “well-understood, routine, [and] conventional activities previously known to the industry.”
Despite being the stated “unconventional” idea of using a distributed architecture, the court noted that the patent may still fail on anticipation or obviousnesss grounds.
Writing in dissent, Judge Reyna offered several different arguments. First, Reyna argue that the court’s skipping of Alice/Mayo Step 1 helped lead to an incorrect result. If you do not define the abstract idea at issue, how do you know whether the claim includes something more? Reyna also argued that the “distribution architecture … is insufficient to satisfy Alice step two” because the limitation is not actually found in the claims and, even as interpreted provide only a functional result. Reyna does note that the specification provides sufficient description of a distributed architecture, but that the claims themselves lack the requisite detail.
The specifications disclose a distributed system architecture comprising special-purpose components configured to cooperate with one another according to defined protocols in a user-configurable manner for the purpose of deriving useful accounting records in a more scalable and efficient manner than previously possible. The disclosed system improves upon prior art systems by creating a specific “distributed filtering and aggregation system . . . [that] eliminates capacity bottlenecks” through distributed processing. ’ The disclosed system is patent eligible. But the inquiry is not whether the specifications disclose a patent-eligible system, but whether the claims are directed to a patent ineligible concept.