I know you, dear loyal readers, depend upon us for your very sustenance. A week with IP/DE is like a week without the sun, a summer without ice cream, a concert with no encore. The life of a patent lawyer is gray enough without the small indignity of a blog break.
But we have begun our halting return! Andrew reminded me that we were back today, and following some initial cursing that cannot be repeated on even the most bawdy of blogs, we have again taken up the mantle of infotainment resource.
Rejoice!
Today's case is a fun one. Plaintiff in BE Tech. LLC v. Google LLC, C.A. No. 20-622-GBW, D.I. 348 (D. Del. Apr. 16, 2026) had a rocky road to summary judgment. At the motion to dismiss stage --long long ago now -- they'd faced a series of 101 challenges to the patent in suit. In these proceedings, Judge Stark had twice found that one of the claims in the patent in suit was representative and that it failed Alice at step one for being directed to an abstract idea.
The motions were ultimately denied however with the court finding that fact issues precluded a decision on step 2. Defendants ultimately filed IPR's on all of the patents and the case was stayed for some time. The PTAB then invalidated all but one claim of one of the patents -- not the one that the court had previously found representative.
The case resumed and the parties cross-moved for summary judgment on 101 grounds. The plaintiff argued that the court's prior holding that the now-invalid claim was representative, and that all the claims failed step 1, was no longer binding now that the claim was out of the case.
Judge Williams disagreed, ultimately finding ...
