Samsung uses Alice ruling to challenge Apple patents

Samsung has demanded that two Apple patents it was accused of infringing are declared invalid, citing a Supreme Court decision on the eligibility of computer-implemented inventions.

In a motion filed at the US District Court for the Northern District of California, Samsung has asked that the patents in question are cancelled in light of last month’s Supreme Court decision in the Alice Corporation v CLS Bank case.

Following the most recent patent battle between the smartphone makers in May, some Samsung devices were found to infringe US patent number 8,046,721, which covers the “slide to unlock” feature.

Samsung was deemed not to have infringed another Apple patent in the suit, US number 6,847,959, which refers to a “universal interface” for retrieval of information in a computer system.

Nevertheless the South Korea-based company was ordered to pay $119.6 million in damages.

But in the motion, filed on Thursday, July 3, Samsung said the Supreme Court’s guidance from the Alice case should be taken into account.

The hotly anticipated case, which was settled last month, ruled that an abstract idea is not patentable simply because it is tied to a computer system.

It said that such ideas are not patentable unless the claim contains an “inventive concept” which could transform the abstract idea into a patent-eligible application.

Samsung said the claims in the two Apple patents attempt to “claim an abstract idea, implemented with generic computer functions that do not state any technical innovation”.

On the “slide-to-unlock” patent, Samsung said that “simply using a computer to implement the abstract idea of moving a lock from locked to unlocked position does not render the idea patentable”.

Apple and Samsung have been fighting over smartphone patents in several jurisdictions around the world.

Both have been encouraged to participate in mediation but so far attempts have proved fruitless.

Apple declined to comment.