Pixar handed pixel patent win at Federal Circuit

Pixar has been handed a win in a patent infringement lawsuit heard by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Yesterday, March 15, the court affirmed a district court judgment that found a patent asserted against Pixar and technology company Nvidia Corporation was invalid.

Louis Coffelt, the owner of US patent number 8,614,710, sued the companies at the US District Court for the Central District of California.

The patent is directed to “a method for deriving a pixel colour in a graphic image”.

Nvidia’s motion to dismiss was granted by the court, which concluded that all claims of the ‘710 patent are invalid under section 101, as they are directed to the “abstract mathematical algorithm for calculating and comparing regions in space”.

The district court said that in the invention, “a pixel colour is derived mathematically using vectors in a particular steradian region. The calculations claimed can be done by a human mentally or with a pen and paper”.

Coffelt then appealed to the Federal Circuit, arguing that the claims are patent eligible on two grounds.

First, the inventor said, the claims are not directed to an abstract idea because “space[—]the region we all exist in[—]or abstract space … is a distinct element required by the claims”.

He also argued that the claims recite an inventive concept because “3D steradian space infrastructure is an improvement over the prior state of the art 2D shadow map framework”.

But the Federal Circuit said “neither argument is persuasive”.

The court held that the claims are directed to the “abstract idea of calculating and comparing regions in space”.

This followed Synopsys v Mentor Graphics Corp, in which the court held that “analysing information by steps people [can] go through in their minds, or by mathematical algorithms, without more … [are] mental processes within the abstract-idea category”.

“We have considered Coffelt’s remaining arguments but find them to be unpersuasive,” said the court.

Speaking to WIPR, Coffelt said that he will file a petition for a writ of certiorari at the US Supreme Court.

Did you enjoy reading this story?  Sign up to our free daily newsletters and get stories like this sent straight to your inbox