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Entries for tag: § 101 Days

Judge Burke Applies "Motion Day" Procedure to non-§ 101 Motions

Andrew E. Russell, April 17, 2023
§ 101 Days

Two birds with one stone—Or three, I suppose.
Two birds with one stone—Or three, I suppose. Dulcey Lima, Unsplash

As we've discussed, starting last decade some of our judges have dealt with the influx of § 101 motions by setting "§ 101 motion days" and addressing multiple § 101 motions in multiple cases at the same time and in the same oral argument, with attorneys for each party required to attend the full argument.

These days seem to have been a success, because today Judge Burke issued an order applying the same procedure to a new type of motion—motions to dismiss or strike inequitable conduct allegations:

WHEREAS, the Court has received numerous motions challenging the accused infringer’s counterclaims and/or affirmative defenses relating to inequitable conduct (hereafter, …
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Six Patents Survive Judge Stark's Section 101 Day

Jeff Castellano, Nov. 30, 2021
§ 101 Days MTD

All six challenged patents survived Judge Stark's most recent § 101 Day, held on November 22, 2021. The six patents were spread across three cases. Continuing his usual practice, Judge Stark ruled from the bench after hearing argument in all three cases, and then issued a written order (see below) incorporating the transcript of his bench ruling and the formal orders on the pending motions.

DNA
DNA DNA, ANIRUDH, Unsplash

In the first case, considering Step One of the Alice framework, Judge Stark found that the challenged patent was not directed to the abstract idea posited by the defendant ("an algorithmic method of manipulating and combining genetic sequence data using an [intermediate] data set") and instead "enables the identification of mutations with positional accuracy in a computationally tractable manner," solving a prior art problem - notably, that sequence assembly providing for accurate detection of variants was often computationally intractable for high-throughput analysis.

Judge Stark denied the motion to dismiss based on the Step One analysis.

In the second case, Judge Stark took the somewhat unusual path of deciding Step Two of the Alice test before Step One. He explained:

The Federal Circuit has employed a similar approach and resolved 101 issues at Step Two in several of its cases, ...
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Some Notable Points from Magistrate Judge Hall's § 101 Denial in RSDI v. Lyft

Andrew E. Russell, July 12, 2021
§ 101 Days 12(b)(6)

Ridesharing
Brecht Denil, Unsplash

Magistrate Judge Hall issued a § 101 R&R today in Rideshare Displays, Inc. v. Lyft, Inc., C.A. No. 20-1629-RGA-JLH (D. Del.), recommending denial of defendant Lyft's motion to dismiss based on § 101.

The Court found that the patent was not directed to an abstract idea—though it noted that it was a close call—and that, regardless, the invention contained an inventive concept under Step 2 of Alice.

We've all read about dozens (or more) of § 101 opinions over the last few years, but here are a few points of interest from Judge Hall's opinion:

  • Judge Hall closely examined the representativeness of the alleged representative claim, and rejected it as unrepresentative. Choose …
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Final Score Card for the March 12th § 101 Day Hearing

Andrew E. Russell, March 22, 2021
§ 101 Days § 101

On Friday, Chief Judge Stark released his opinion summarizing his bench rulings from his most recent Section 101 day. This is how the patents fared:

Content Square v. Quantum Metric, Inc., C.A. No. 20-832-LPS (D. Del.)

In the first case, Content Square, the Court invalidated the claims of 2 of the 5 asserted patents.

Not this kind of web crawling.
Not this kind of web crawling. Michael Anfang, Unsplash

The invalidated patents related to "heat map patents," which relate to displaying heat maps of web browsing data. These include U.S. Patent Nos. 10,063,645 and 10,079,737.

The third patent, which was not invalidated, related to "creating multiple versions of a website to determine users' preferences." Interestingly, the Court held …

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