The Federal Circuit has affirmed a district court’s dismissal of patent infringement case involving web conferencing systems with time-shifting capabilities. The court found that the patent’s claims were directed to a patent-ineligible abstract idea because the claims don’t describe how the specific technological improvement can be achieved.

The case is U.S. Patent No. 7,679,637 LLC v. Google LLC.

As the court explains,

Appellant owns U.S. Patent No. 7,679,637, which relates to web conferencing systems that include “time-shifting capabilities” enabling participants “to observe [a] session in real-time, delayed while the session is still in progress, or after the session has completed.”

Also,

the claims allow data streams (e.g., video, chat data, documents, web pages, and whiteboarding sessions) to be viewed asynchronously, for example, to go back and review one aspect of a multimedia presentation while another aspect is proceeding live.

Appellant sued Google for allegedly infringing claims 2–5 and 7–9 of the ’637 patent. 

Google moved to dismiss the complaint under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6), arguing the asserted claims are patent-ineligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101.

Under Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Int’l, 573 U.S. 208, 217–18 (2014), determining patent eligibility under § 101 is a two-part process.

First, a court “must . . . determine whether the claims at issue are directed to a patent ineligible concept,” such as an abstract idea.

If so, then a court must then “consider the elements of each claim both individually and ‘as an ordered combination’ to determine whether the additional elements ‘transform the nature of the claim’ into a patent-eligible application.”

The US Supreme Court has described the second step as

a search for an ‘inventive concept’—i.e., an element or combination of elements that is ‘sufficient to ensure that the patent in practice amounts to significantly more than a patent upon the ineligible concept itself.’

In this case, the district court determined the asserted claims are patent-ineligible because they are directed to an abstract idea and do not include an inventive concept that makes the claims patent-eligible. 

Appellant argued that the district court erred in determining the asserted claims are directed to the abstract idea of “playing back recorded content.”

The Appellant contended that this was an over-generalization of the patent claims, which are directed to a “specific asserted improvement that allows a presentation to be reviewed asynchronously . . . at the same time.”

However, said the Federal Circuit,

Even if we were to narrow the district court’s characterization of the claims, however, we would still conclude the claims are directed to the patent-ineligible abstract idea of allowing asynchronous review of presentations, rather than any specific technological improvement, because they do not “describe how the alleged goal of [asynchronous review] is achieved.”

The court noted that

In cases involving software innovations, [the step-one] inquiry often turns on whether the claims focus on specific asserted improvements in computer capabilities or instead on a process or system that qualifies [as] an abstract idea . . . .

For example, said the court,

Here, independent claim 2 recites that the first and second client applications are “arranged to allow” certain results and that the web conferencing system is “able to” achieve simultaneous recording and observing of current and previously presented parts of a computer screen video and data stream.

However, said the court, neither these claims nor their dependent claims disclose how the claimed results are achieved or embody any specific technological improvement discernible to a skilled artisan from the patent or the prosecution history.

The court also noted, citing Beteiro, LLC v. DraftKings Inc., 104 F.4th 1350, 1356 (Fed. Cir. 2024), that patent claims “drafted using largely (if not entirely) result-focused functional language, containing no specificity about how the purported invention achieves those results . . . are almost always found to be ineligible for patenting under Section 101.”

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