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Federal Circuit Reverses § 101 Summary Judgment Of Invalidity, Holding That Describing Claims At High Level Of Abstraction And Untethered From The Claims’ Language All But Ensures That The Exceptions To § 101 Swallow The Rule
09/18/2024On September 9, 2024, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (“CAFC”) reversed the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California’s decision finding asserted claims invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101. In 2015, Contour IP Holding LLC (“Contour”) sued GoPro, Inc. (“GoPro”), alleging that several GoPro products infringe certain claims of U.S. Patent Nos. 8,890,954 and 8,896,694. In 2021, Contour filed a second lawsuit against GoPro, alleging that GoPro’s new products similarly infringe the asserted patents. The asserted patents share substantially the same specification and are directed to portable, point-of-view (“POV”) video cameras.
According to the asserted patents, POV video cameras were a relatively new product category at the time the patents were filed. The asserted patents disclose a hands-free, POV action sports camera that is configured for remote image acquisition control and viewing. For sports applications, a POV camera is often mounted in a location that prevents the user from seeing the camera easily. As a result, the user is not able to review what is being recorded in real time on the camera.
To address these problems, the asserted patents describe two modifications. First, the asserted patents describe implementing wireless technology in the video camera that allows the camera to send real-time information to a remote device, such as a cell phone. From this remote device, the user can see what is being recorded. The user can also make real-time adjustments to the recording settings, such as light level and audio settings. Second, the asserted patents disclose cameras that are configured to generate recordings in two formats—high-quality and low-quality—in which the low-quality file is streamed to the remote device.
At Alice step one, the district court found the claims directed to the abstract idea of “creating and transmitting video (at two different resolutions) and adjusting the video settings remotely.” At Alice step two, the district court concluded that the claims recite only functions, using results-oriented language with “no indication that the physical components are behaving in any way other than their basic, generic tasks.”
The CAFC disagreed with the district court that the claims are directed to an abstract idea, holding that, when read as a whole, the claims are directed to a specific means that improves the relevant technology. The asserted patents claim an improved POV camera with a processor configured to record low- and high-quality data streams in parallel, followed by transferring the low-quality data stream to a remote device. The claimed POV camera allows a user to remotely view and adjust the recording in real time without bandwidth limitations on wireless data transfer. The CAFC held that the asserted patents require specific, technological means—parallel data stream recording with the low-quality recording wirelessly transferred to a remote device—that in turn provide a technological improvement to the real-time viewing capabilities of a POV camera’s recordings on a remote device.
GoPro argued that the asserted claims are similar to the claims in Yu v. Apple Inc., 1 F.4th 1040 (Fed. Cir. 2021). In Yu, the CAFC held that the claims were “directed to the abstract idea of taking two pictures (which may be different at different exposures) and using one picture to enhance the other in some way.” Id. at 1043. The CAFC rejected GoPro’s argument because, in Yu, there was no dispute that the idea and practice of using multiple pictures to enhance each other has been known by photographers for over a century. Here, GoPro did not argue that a camera’s recording two video streams in parallel and wirelessly transferring the lower quality video stream to a remote device for real-time viewing and adjustment was a long-known or fundamental practice, which would support patent ineligibility at Alice step one.
