On appeal from a motion to dismiss based on subject matter eligibility, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held that a district court appropriately analyzed certain claims as representative claims and that the claims were directed to an abstract idea and did not recite an inventive concept. Mobile Acuity, Ltd. v. Blippar Ltd., Case No. 22-2216 (Fed. Cir. Aug. 6, 2024) (Lourie, Bryson, Stark, JJ.)

Mobile Acuity sued Blippar for infringement of claims from two patents directed to software for accessing stored information with a captured image. Mobile Acuity’s operative second amended complaint asserted that Blippar infringed “at least Claims 9, 11, and 16” of one patent and “Claims 9, 11, and 16” of the other. Blippar asserted that claim 9 of each patent was “representative of the entire claim set in each respective Asserted Patent” and that the patents were invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The district court granted Blippar’s motion and subsequently denied Mobile Acuity’s motion to amend the judgment and for leave to file a third amended complaint.

Mobile Acuity appealed, asserting that the district court committed several errors, including the treatment of claim 9 in each asserted patent as a representative claim and the holding that the asserted patents were invalid as claiming ineligible subject matter.

Mobile Acuity first argued that the district court erred in holding that a challenge under § 101 is not an affirmative defense. The Federal Circuit agreed that an eligibility challenge on § 101 grounds is an affirmative defense but found that the district court simply misspoke when it stated during oral argument “[w]e are not talking about an affirmative defense.” However, the Federal Circuit concluded that the “error in word choice was harmless because the district court applied the correct legal standard for evaluating an affirmative defense at the motion to dismiss stage.”

In support of its denied motion to amend, Mobile Acuity argued that “the district court required it to ‘anticipate [the] defendant’s affirmative defense in its complaint.’” The Federal Circuit rebuffed this argument, concluding that the district court did not grant the motion to dismiss on the grounds that Mobile Acuity failed to address patentable subject matter in its complaints but correctly dismissed based on an affirmative defense that “clearly appears on the face of the pleading.” The Court stated that “as we have repeatedly recognized, it is possible and proper to determine patent eligibility under 35 U.S.C. § 101 on a Rule 12(b)(6) motion.”

On the merits, the Federal Circuit first determined that the district court did not merely treat claim 9 of each of the asserted patents as representative of all claims. The Federal Circuit explained that “the court did more, separately analyzing all six claims Mobile Acuity specifically identified in the operative complaint,” as well as two additional claims. The Federal Circuit also agreed with the district court that the six claims were representative “of all claims of the two Asserted Patents.”

As to the merits of the motion to dismiss, the Federal Circuit used the familiar Alice/Mayo two-step § 101 framework to analyze whether the claims were directed to a non-patentable abstract idea or a patent-eligible application of an abstract concept. The Court started its analysis under step one by determining that representative claims were directed “to the abstract idea of receiving information, associating information with images, comparing the images, and presenting information based on that comparison.” The Court reiterated its “frequent” holding that “claims reciting generalized steps of collecting, analyzing, and presenting information, using nothing other than the conventional operations of generic computer components, are directed to abstract ideas.” Going beyond claim 9 of each patent, the Court added that the other representative claims did not have the requisite “specificity” to fall outside of the realm of an abstract idea. The Court noted that even if there was sufficient detail, that explanation was in the wrong section – it was in the patent specification. The Court noted that the required detail must be “included in the claims,” as “it is the [Asserted Claims themselves] that must supply the non-abstract idea.”

At step two of the Alice/Mayo analysis, the Federal Circuit agreed with the district court that the representative claims “do not recite an inventive concept.” The Court held that Mobile Acuity’s purported inventive concept was merely “part of the abstract idea of comparing images and displaying information based on the comparison,” and that this did not reach the threshold of being “significantly more” than the abstract idea itself.