Thales Visionix Inc. v. United States, Federal Circuit 2017 (Software Patents)
Thales Visionix Inc. appealed from a Claims Court judgment that most claims of its U.S. Patent No. 6,474,159 were directed to patent-ineligible subject matter.
The patent discloses an inertial tracking system for tracking the motion of an object relative to a moving reference frame. Inertial sensors, such as accelerometers and gyroscopes, measure the specific forces associated with changes in a sensor’s position and orientation relative to a known starting position. Such sensors are used in a wide variety of applications, including aircraft navigation and virtual reality simulations. When mounted on a moving object, inertial sensors can calculate the position, orientation, and velocity of the object in 3-dimensional space, based on a specified starting point, without the need for any other…
This decision should be very interesting to software developers who want software patents on unique graphical user interfaces. The decision is non-precedential, but can be cited to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office when the facts in a patent application uniquely match those in this case. Up until this case, and after Alice, the Federal Circuit had consistently found the claims to user interfaces patent-ineligible, reasoning that generically claimed user interfaces that merely present information that had been collected and analyzed are ineligible.
Amdoc sued Openet over four software patents directed to solving accounting and billing problems faced by network service providers. The district court held that the software patents were directed to patent-ineligible abstract ideas.
This was an appeal from a grant of judgment on the pleadings that the asserted claims of two software patents, U.S. Patent Nos. 6,307,576 (‘‘the ’576 patent’’) and 6,611,278 (‘‘the ’278 patent’’) were invalid.
This was an appeal against a district court decision that the claims of U.S. Patent No. 5,987,606 are invalid as a matter of law under 35 U.S.C. § 101.
TLI Communications hold U.S. Patent No. 6,038,295 relating to a method and system for taking, transmitting, and organizing digital images.
Enfish sued Microsoft for infringement of U.S. Patent 6,151,604 and U.S. Patent 6,163,775 related to a logical model for a computer database. A logical model is a model of data for a computer database explaining how the various elements of information are related to one another. A logical model generally results in the creation of particular tables of data, but it does not describe how the bits and bytes of those tables are arranged in physical memory devices. Contrary to conventional logical models, the patented logical model includes all data entities in a single table, with column definitions provided by rows in that same table. The patents describe this as a “self-referential” property of the database.