The fight by patent practitioners through the murky waters of patent eligibility for data processing/computing based inventions may have had an additional degree of clarity added with the Federal Circuit’s recent precedential ruling in Electric Power Group, LLC v. Alstom S.A., Alstom Grid Inc., Psymetrix, LTD,. Alstom Limited, 2015-1778. (http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/opinions-orders/15-1778.Opinion.7-28-2016.1.PDF).
At issue in the case was the subject matter eligibility of Electric Power Group, LLC’s (EPG) U.S. Patent Nos. 7,233,843, 8,060,259 and 8,401,710 under 35 U.S.C. § 101. In the case, the lower court held that the EPG claims were directed to “the abstract idea of monitoring and analyzing data from disparate sources.” Additional recitations limiting this monitoring and analyzing to the context of electric power grids were insufficient to impart eligibility to the claims.
In its analysis, the Federal Circuit stated that “Information as such is an intangible…Accordingly we have treated collecting information…as within the realm of abstract ideas.” “The advance they purport to make is a process of gathering and analyzing information of a specified content, then displaying the results, and not any particularly assertedly inventive technology for performing those functions.”
Were this the end, little additional insight into the currently state of statutory subject matter analysis could be gleaned from the Federal Circuit’s decision. Fortunately, the Court provided further guidance by contrasting the EPG claims with hypothetical claim constructs which may provide an additional exemplary instance of patent-eligible subject matter.
The Court stated, “[T]he [district] court reasoned, “there is a critical difference between patenting a particular concrete solution to a problem and attempting to patent the abstract idea of a solution to the problem in general. Electric Power Group’s asserted claims, the [district] court observed, do the latter: rather than claiming ‘some specific way of enabling a computer to monitor data from multiple sources across an electric power grid,’ some ‘particular implementation,’ they ‘purport to monopolize every potential solution to the problem’—any way of effectively monitoring multiple sources on a power grid.” (Emphasis added).
It is this focus on some specific “enabling” technology allowing for the performance of data processing that may provide an additional pathway for patent practitioners in crafting claims that may satisfy the subject matter eligibility requirements of 35 U.S.C. § 101. The court may be indicating that claims including recitations which serve to enable processing (e.g. specific data acquisition technology, specific data transfer network configurations, etc.) may be sufficient to impart eligibility.
In EPG’s case, the Court noted that the “most significant additional limitations…are those that limit the claim[s] to monitoring and analyzing data in the context of electric power grids.” However, under the Federal Circuits hypothetical scenario, if the claims were recast to include specific enabling technology unique to that “context of electric power grids”, perhaps the claims could be rendered patent-eligible. As such a context is already at the heart of EPG’s claims, specific enabling technology inherent to that context would not result in a large reduction in patent claim scope.