Hewlett-Packard patents invalidated by US court

Technology company Hewlett-Packard (HP) has suffered a setback in its fight against software company ServiceNow after a US court invalidated half of the patents it had asserted.

In a ruling at the US District Court for the Northern District of California San Jose Division, district judge Beth Labson Freeman ruled that four patents at the centre of an infringement claim filed by HP do not cover “ patentable subject matter”.

In her ruling, on Tuesday (March 10), Freeman cited the US Supreme Court’s ruling in the Alice v CLS Bank case.

In that case, which culminated in June last year, the US Supreme Court ruled that the “computer implementation” of an inventive process “fails to transform that abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention”.

The HP case started when the company sued ServiceNow at the Californian district court last February and claimed that the software management company infringed a total of eight patents.

The four patents judged to be invalid covered computer software that manages information for users.

On US patent 8,224,683, one of the four invalidated patents, Freeman wrote: “The claims of the ‘683 patent do nothing more than recite the abstract idea of monitoring deadlines ... and are not directed to patentable subject matter”.

A spokesperson for HP told WIPR that the company is "disappointed by the court's ruling" and is "considering the next steps as this is a rapidly evolving area of the law".

"We will continue to press forward with our claims on the remaining four patents," it added.

ServiceNow did not respond to a request for comment.