by Dennis Crouch
Myspace, Inc. v. GraphOn Corp. (Fed. Cir. 2012)
In yet another case, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has identified the wide chasm separating members of the court on issues involving patentable subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The majority opinion here - penned by Judge Plager and joined by Judge Newman - argues that courts should avoid the metaphysical question of whether an invention is unpatentably abstract whenever possible and instead focus on the conditions of patentability found in §§ 102, 103, and 112 of the patent act.
Judge Plager writes:
[C]ourts could avoid the swamp of verbiage that is § 101 by exercising their inherent power to control the processes of litigation, Chambers v. NASCO, Inc., 501 U.S. 32, 43 (1991), and insist that litigants initially address patent invalidity issues in terms of the conditions of patentability defenses as the statute provides, specifically §§ 102, 103, and 112. If that were done in the typical patent case, litigation over the question of validity of the patent would be concluded under these provisions, and it would be unnecessary to enter the murky morass that is § 101 jurisprudence. This would make patent litigation more efficient, conserve judicial resources, and bring a degree of certainty to the interests of both patentees and their competitors in the marketplace.
Judge Plager goes on to adopt the analogy to the Constitutional Avoidance Doctrine that Rob Merges and I suggested in our 2010 article titled Operating Efficiently Post-Bilski by Ordering Patent Doctrine Decision-Making.
In a sense, § 101 of the Patent Act can be thought of as the patent law analogy to the Bill of Rights of the Constitution. The latter sets in the broadest terms ("due process," "equal protection") the fundamental parameters of the citizenry's legal right. In the context of patent law, § 101 similarly describes in the broadest terms the legally-protected subject matter an inventor can seek to patent: a "process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter . . . ." The Supreme Court has wisely adopted a policy of not deciding cases on broad constitutional grounds when they can be decided on narrower, typically statutorily limited, grounds. Following the Supreme Court's lead, courts should avoid reaching for interpretations of broad provisions, such as § 101, when more specific statutes, such as §§ 102, 103, and 112, can decide the case.
On the merits of the decision, the majority affirmed a lower court summary judgment holding that the asserted claims are invalid as anticipated and obvious under §§ 102 and 103(a) respectively.
In this case, the lower court never ruled on the question of patentable subject matter and none of the party briefs refer to Section 101, unpatentable abstract ideas, or Bilski v. Kappos. However, the majority felt compelled to discuss Section 101 based upon the dissenting opinion by Judge Mayer who opined that the patent intrinsically raises a threshold question of patentable subject matter that must be addressed.
Judge Mayer writes in dissent:
The issue of whether a claimed method meets the subject matter eligibility requirements contained in 35 U.S.C. § 101 is an "antecedent question" that must be addressed before this court can consider whether particular claims are invalid as obvious or anticipated. In re Comiskey, 554 F.3d 967, 975 n.7 (Fed. Cir. 2009). GraphOn Corporation ("GraphOn") owns four patents, U.S. Patent Nos. 6,324,538 (the "'538 patent"), 6,850,940, 7,028,034, and 7,269,591, which contain exceedingly broad claims to a system that allows users to exert control over the content of their online communications. This court must first resolve the issue of whether the GraphOn patents are directed to an unpatentable "abstract idea" before proceeding to consider subordinate issues related to obviousness and anticipation. See Bilski v. Kappos, 130 S. Ct. 3218, 3225 (2010) (noting that whether claims are directed to statutory subject matter is a "threshold test"); Parker v. Flook, 437 U.S. 584, 593 (1978) ("Flook") (emphasizing that "[t]he obligation to determine what type of discovery is sought to be patented" so as to determine whether it falls within the ambit of section 101 "must precede the determination of whether that discovery is, in fact, new or obvious"); Comiskey, 554 F.3d at 973 ("Only if the requirements of § 101 are satisfied is the inventor allowed to pass through to the other requirements for patentability, such as novelty under § 102 and . . . non-obviousness under § 103." (citations and internal quotation marks omitted)). I therefore respectfully dissent from the court's judgment.
The dissent agrees with the majority (and our) suggestion that § 101 be treated as analogous to the US Constitution – but argues that the statute "is the standard expressed in the Constitution and it may not be ignored." Rather, the dissent writes "a robust application of section 101 is required to ensure that the patent laws comport with their constitutionally-defined objective."
Below, I have excerpted claim 1 of the patentee’s U.S. Patent No. 6,324,538 with a 1995 priority filing date:
1. A method of publishing information on a computer network comprising the steps of: creating a database entry containing information recieved from a user of the computer network, wherein the information includes data representing text, a universal resource locator, an image, and a user-selected category; generating a transaction ID corresponding to the database entry; password protecting the entries; displaying the entries in accordance with the user-selected category; presenting the information to a user in hyper text markup language in response to a user's request.
The dissent is correct that the invention as claimed is incredibly broad. However, this is the exact type of case that is just as easily eliminated on grounds of anticipation or obviousness.
Note for a later post — the majority opinion is also important for its statement on the theory and practice of claim construction.
