Jericho Petitions US Supreme Court for Judicial Review of Patent Eligibility of Computer Implemented Method

In a Petition for a Writ of Certiorari, Jericho Systems Corporation (Jericho) petitioned the Supreme Court of the United States for judicial review of a decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) affirming a US District Court finding that US Patent No. 8,560,836 (the ‘836 Patent) lacked patent-eligibility under the test set out in Alice v CLS Bank (Alice), previously reported in the E-TIPS newsletter here.

The United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas (the District Court) found that claims of the ‘836 Patent, which are directed towards systems and methods to process authenticated user requests to access resources, encompass an abstract idea and do not have an inventive concept beyond the application of that abstract idea.  The District Court found that the ’836 Patent “uses standard computer processes to implement an idea unrelated to computer technology.  It does not change [the] way a computer functions or the way the internet operates.” As such, the District Court held that the claims of the ‘836 Patent were invalid for claiming patent-ineligible subject matter.  The CAFC affirmed the District Court’s decision without opinion.

In its petition, Jericho argues that the CAFC and the District Court erred by failing to consider that the claims of the ‘836 Patent do not pre-empt other non-infringing systems and methods to carry out the identified abstract idea.  Pre-emption, they argue, is the concern that drives the exclusionary principle as described in Alice.  Consequently, Jericho requests judicial review of the lower court decisions in order to “resolve the conflict, dispel the confusion, and bring the Federal Circuit’s case law in line with [Alice].”