December 2014

Spotlight Info

In Ultramercial, Inc. v. Hulu, LLC, No. 10-1544 (Fed. Cir. Nov. 14, 2014), the Federal Circuit—on remand from the Supreme Court in light of Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, 573 U.S. __, 134 S. Ct. 2347 (2014)—affirmed the district court’s determination that the asserted patent did not claim patent-eligible subject matter.  The Court concluded that “the limitations of the [patent’s] claims do not transform the abstract idea that they recite into patent-eligible subject matter because the claims simply instruct the practitioner to implement the abstract idea with routine, conventional activity.  None of these eleven individual steps, viewed ‘both individually and as an ordered combination,’ transform the nature of the claim into patent-eligible subject matter.”
Slip op. at 11 (quoting Alice, 134 S. Ct. at 2355) (internal quotation marks omitted).  See this month’s edition of Last Month at the Federal Circuit for a full summary of this decision.