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15 May 2017Patents

Federal Circuit upholds Twitter patent victory

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has affirmed a victory for social media site Twitter.

In a decision handed down on Friday, May 12, the court affirmed a ruling that five messaging patents owned by New York-based EasyWeb Innovations were invalid.

EasyWeb had sued Twitter back in 2011, alleging infringement of US patent numbers 7,032,030; 7,596,606; 7,685,247; 7,689,658; and 7,698,372.

The patents are generally directed to allowing “any person or organisation to easily publish a message on the internet”.

At the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Twitter moved for summary judgment of non-infringement and ineligibility under 35 USC, section 101.

The court granted the motion, finding that the patents were directed towards ineligible subject matter, or in the alternative that Twitter did not infringe any of them.

EasyWeb appealed.

Applying the Alice v CLS Bank test, the appeals court found that claim 1 of the patent was directed to an abstract idea and that the claim doesn’t contain an inventive concept sufficient to transform the nature of the claim into a patent-eligible application.

“As we have explained in a number of cases, claims involving data collection, analysis, and publication are directed to an abstract idea,” said Circuit Judge Todd Hughes.

He added: “In sum, all the claims are directed to the abstract idea of receiving, authenticating, and publishing data, and fail to recite any inventive concepts sufficient to transform the abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention.”

The Federal Circuit affirmed the lower court’s decision.

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18 January 2018   Social media platform Twitter is facing a lawsuit for trademark infringement and breach of contract at the US District Court for the Northern District of California.