aaaaiiiphonlamaiphoto
30 October 2018Patents

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.

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

Today's top stories

US bans exports to Chinese firm amid IP litigation

Fabric supplier targets Zara in copyright complaint

US customs seizes Mercedes-Benz counterfeits

AIPLA 2018: IPEC commends Trump’s stance on IP

Allen & Overy IP team joins Kirkland & Ellis

Already registered?

Login to your account

To request a FREE 2-week trial subscription, please signup.
NOTE - this can take up to 48hrs to be approved.

Two Weeks Free Trial

For multi-user price options, or to check if your company has an existing subscription that we can add you to for FREE, please email Adrian Tapping at atapping@newtonmedia.co.uk


More on this story

article
21 November 2018   A US judge ruled that Bloomberg must face trade secret accusations late last week, after the financial and media company failed to convince the court to dismiss the claims of trade secret misappropriation.
Patents
17 January 2020   In a victory for financial and media company Bloomberg, a US judge has dismissed the remainder of a lawsuit brought by artificial intelligence firm iSentium over an investment analysis tool.
article
1 October 2020   Bloomberg Finance has agreed to settle a lawsuit against UBS over claims the Swiss investment bank misused proprietary financial data.