Bloomberg triumphs against AI company in social media patent spat
Financial and media company Bloomberg has prevailed against artificial intelligence (AI) company iSentium in a patent dispute over social media technology.
Yesterday, October 29, a judge at the US District Court for the Southern District of New York swatted (pdf) iSentium’s claim against Bloomberg, saying its asserted patent (US number 8,856,056) does not describe eligible subject matter.
The patent describes a method for evaluating statements posted to Twitter that discuss publicly traded assets, evaluating whether the statements express a positive, negative or neutral opinion, and assigning them a score.
“It claims to do so with a scale, efficiency and accuracy that is not possible for human readers, and to anticipate changes in an asset’s price before human traders can act,” said Judge Kevin Castel in his decision.
In 2013, iSentium and Bloomberg had entered into an agreement in which the AI company’s technology was incorporated into the Bloomberg Terminal, a system that allows financial services professionals to analyse real-time market data. By 2016, the parties terminated the relationship.
iSentium then sued Bloomberg in October 2017, claiming the media company had infringed the patent in developing its own application for analysing social media posts.
Bloomberg sought to have the case thrown out on the ground that the ‘056 patent is directed to an abstract idea.
Yesterday, the court granted Bloomberg’s motion.
Castel agreed that the patent is directed to the abstract idea of interpreting a written statement posted to social media and said that it failed to meet either stage of the two-step test set out by the US Supreme Court in Alice v CLS Bank in 2014.
Under this test, courts must first determine whether the claims at issue are directed to an abstract idea or natural phenomenon and, if so, they consider whether the claims have an inventive concept that transforms the abstract idea into a patent-eligible application.
The court said that “selecting information, analysing it with mathematical techniques and reporting the results” is not eligible for patent protection.
Analysing step two, the court said: “Contrary to iSentium’s argument, the ‘056 patent purports to describe an improvement to data analysis, and not an improvement to the functionality of a computer or network.”
In its complaint last year, iSentium filed additional claims under New York State law against Bloomberg, including allegations of trade secrets misappropriation. While Bloomberg has also sought to dismiss these, the court denied the motion pending further submissions on these issues.
On its website, iSentium claims to be the “only social sentiment provider with three granted patents (and two additional pending)”—one of which is the ‘056 patent in this case.
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