PLANET BLUE v. NAMCO – Abstract at the “Point of Novelty”

Posted on September 29, 2014 by Warren Woessner

In McRO, Inc. d.b.a. Planet Blue v. Namco Bandai Games America, civ. No. CV 12-10322-GW (FFMx) (C. D. Cal., Sept. 22, 2014), the granted Defendant’s motion for judgment on the pleadings that US Patent numbers 6,307,576 and 6,611, 278, were invalid as attempts to claim an abstract idea. (A copy of the decision is available at the end of this post.)

The claims were directed to automatically animated lip synchronization and facial expression of 3D animated characters. The court read the claims in view of the admitted state of the prior art and located a single “point of novelty”: “[T]he idea of using rules, including timing rules, to automate the process of generating keyframes.” “So what the claim adds to the prior art is the use of rules, rather than artists to set the morph weights and transitions between phonemes [e.g., the change in the shape of the lips as words are spoken.]”

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Genetic Technologies v. LabCorp. – Mayo Redux.

Posted on September 16, 2014 by Warren Woessner

It was Mayo redux with a vengeance in the September 23, 2014 decision in Genetic Technologies Ltd. v. Laboratory Corp. of Amer. Holdings et al., Civil Action No. 12-1736-LPS-CJB (D. Del. 2014).  Magistrate Judge Burke released an opinion invalidating claim 1 of Genetic Technologies U.S. Patent No. 7,615,342 as claiming non-patentable subject matter under s. 101 that could have been stenciled from the PTO s.101 Guidelines. Claim 1 was directed to a method to predict potential sprinting, strength or power performance in a human. The claim had an “analyzing step” to look for variations in the ACTN3 gene of the human, a “detecting step” to determine the presence of two 577R alleles at a loci of the ACTN3 protein and (c) a “predicting step” positively associating two copies of the allele with the performance elements.

Citing Mayo v. Prometheus and PerkinElmer v. Intema copiously, the correlation between the alleles and athletic performance was held to be a natural law and the analyzing and detecting steps were the “employment of … routine conventional process[es]” that were not sufficient to transform an unpatentable law of nature into a patent-eligible application of such a law. The “predicting step” was dismissed as “’no more than an instruction [to] apply the [natural] law.’ Prometheus, 132 S Ct at 1297.”

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FDA Publishes “Purple Book” for Biologicals/Biosimilars

Posted on September 11, 2014 by Warren Woessner

In a major move to get organized for the oncoming wave of biosimilar applications, the FDA has published a “Purple Book” listing licensed (e.g., approved) biologicals and licensed interchangeable biosimilars. Rather than summarize the contents table of the book, linked here is the publication from BIO’s new Intellectual Property Newsletter that links to the FDA press release from the FDA Blog.

CDER List of Licensed Biological Products

CBER List of Licensed Biological Products

 

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Indefiniteness After Nautilus – A Very “Delicate Balance”

Posted on September 11, 2014 by Warren Woessner

In Interval Lighting v. AOL, Inc., Appeal no. 2013-1282, -1283, -1284, -1285 (Fed. Cir. Sept. 10, 2014), the appealed indefiniteness finding by the district court was affirmed by the Fed. Cir. panel. This was not surprising, since the disputed term was that some sort of extraneous information– like an advertisement – would be displayed on a computer screen during use in an “unobtrusive manner.” This term (one of “degree”) was termed “highly subjective” by the panel, that found that “its scope…depends ‘on the predictable vagaries of any one person’s opinion.’”

Interval Lighting’s last hope was to convince the panel that the term “unobtrusive manner” should be defined by reference to a “narrow example” from the specification, such as displaying the image in a limited area of the screen. However, the relied-upon embodiment was disclosed in the following way: “e.g., the information is presented in areas of a display screen that are not used by displayed information associated with the primary interaction with the apparatus.”

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Posted in Patenting Methods/Processes | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments