Clear Skies for Travel Website Kayak.com as Patent Infringement Suit Dismissed

On July 1, 2015, in Source Search Technologies, LLC v Kayak Software Corporation, a US federal judge dismissed a patent infringement suit against Kayak Software Corp (Kayak), which owns the travel search website Kayak.com.  The New Jersey based federal court judge ultimately found the concept behind the plaintiff's quote-generating software too abstract to be patent-eligible.

The plaintiff, Source Search Technologies (SST), alleged that Kayak infringed its patent (US Patent number 5,758,328, the “’328 patent”) for "a method and system that allows a central computer to filter requests for quotes, and to interface to various vendor computers to obtain and forward such quotes to potential buyers of goods and services."

In response, Kayak filed a motion for summary judgment that SST had patented a well-worn business practice on a computer network using generic computer technology that fails to add significantly more to the otherwise abstract idea of obtaining quotes from vendors.

US District Judge Joseph Irenas agreed with Kayak and granted the company's motion for summary judgment.  Justice Irenas noted that the “patent fail[ed] [to] add the inventive concept necessary to transform the otherwise abstract concept of obtaining quotes from select vendors into a patent-eligible invention."

In reaching his decision, Justice Irenas found persuasive the fact that SST’s patent failed to detail how the software actually acquires quote information from vendor databases.  "SST acknowledged during oral argument that many different kinds of software could facilitate interface between a central system and vendor databases," Irenas said. "The '328 patent, in avoiding specificity, would cover them all. That is the kind of result the Supreme Court and Federal Circuit have sought to avoid."