Federal Circuit Rejects Computer Readable Media Claims under Section 101

The ebb and flow regarding the scope of patentable subject matter for computer-related inventions continues this week with the Federal Circuits decision in Cybersource Corp. v. Retail Decisions, Inc.

In Cybersource, two claims of U.S. Patent No. 6,029,154 (“the ‘154 patent”) were invalidated by the district court under 35 U.S.C. § 101 for failure to recite patent-eligible subject matter.  One of the claims, Claim 3 was directed to a “method for verifying the validity of a credit card transaction” and recited three steps, including “obtaining information…”, “constructing a map of credit card numbers…,” and “utilizing the map…to determine if the credit card transaction is valid.”   Claim 2 was directed to “computer readable medium containing programming instructions” and recited “execution of the program instructions by one or more processors of a computer system” in the body of the claim.  The Federal Circuit affirmed. 

The decision with respect to the naked method claim (claim 3) is not too controversial.  The outcome with respect to Claim 2, however, represents a significant shift in the patent-eligible subject matter landscape.  Why, you ask?  Because for the last 15 years, patent practitioners in the computer arts have relied on In re Beauregard, 53 F.3d 1583 (Fed. Cir. 1995) for the proposition that claims drawn to “computer readable media” were patent-eligible articles of manufacture, not methods subject to the vagaries of Section 101. (“The Commissioner now states ‘that computer programs embodied in a tangible medium, such as floppy diskettes, are patentable subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101 and must be examined under 35 U.S.C. §§ 102 and 103.’)  (Note - there was no actual holding from the Federal Circuit in In re Beauregard, simply a remand. Since the Commissioner ultimately agreed with Beauregard’s position, there was no longer a case or controversy and thus no jurisdiction before the Federal Circuit.) The Federal Circuit has now dispelled this long-held reliance: 

Cybersource contends that, by definition, a tangible, man-made article of manufacture such as a ‘computer readable medium containing program instructions’ cannot possibly fall within any of ht three patent-eligibility exceptions the Supreme Court has recognized for ‘laws of nature, physical phenomena, [or] abstract ideas.” [citation omitted] We disagree.  Opinion at 16.

With those two words, the validity of claims in thousands of issued patents to computer-related inventions  are now in doubt. 

One line from this opinion that I find somewhat disturbing is that “[r]egardless of what statutory category (‘process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter’ 35 U.S.C. § 101) a claims language is crafted to literally invoke, we look to the underlying invention for patent-eligibility purposes.”  In every other context we need to look at the claim language, all of the claim language, in order to define the “invention.”  Under the Cybersource analysis, courts may now ignore express limitations in the claim (such as “computer readable media” or “one or more processors”) to determine an “underlying invention” that is broader than what is actually claimed in order to invoke Section 101.  Creating a double standard for the Section 101 analysis just doesn’t feel right.

Very little is certain about the scope of patent-eligible subject matter for computer-related inventions in view of the Cybersource decision except this:  we have not seen the end of this issue.  My bet is that en banc review is in our near future.