BASCOM v AT&T: Filtering Internet Content Found Patent-Eligible

In BASCOM Global Internet Services, Inc v AT&T Mobility LLC, (Fed Cir June 27, 2016), the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) released its latest opinion rejecting a patent-eligibility challenge. 

At the district court, AT&T had argued that the subject patent was “directed to the abstract idea of ‘filtering content,’ ‘filtering internet content,’ or ‘determining who gets to see what,” and that none of the limitations “transforms the abstract idea of filtering content into patent-eligible subject matter because they do no more than recite routine and conventional activities performed by generic computer components.  The district court agreed with AT&T.

On appeal, the CAFC reversed based on the second step of the framework established by the US Supreme Court decisions in Alice Corp v CLS Bank and Mayo v Prometheus.  The CAFC first articulated that the invention was directed to “filtering content on the Internet” which is an abstract idea.  However, because the inventive concept claimed customizable filtering features specific to each end user, a design that gives the filtering tool both the benefits of a filter on a local computer and the benefits of a filter on the ISP server, the Court found that the claims do not “preempt all ways of filtering content on the Internet; rather, they recite a specific, discrete implementation of the abstract idea of filtering content.”  As a result, the CAFC concluded that the claims established patent-eligibility– not because the features themselves provided an “inventive concept,” but because the arrangement of those elements did. 

Additional commentary on this topic is available at Patently-O.