Cellspin urges US Supreme Court to deny certiorari in Garmin suit
Patent owner Cellspin has urged the US Supreme Court to reject Garmin’s petition for certiorari in a dispute over whether patent eligibility is a matter of law that can be resolved by courts.
Garmin, along with other technology companies such as Canon and FitBit, has asked the Supreme Court to review a decision of the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which overturned a victory for the US technology company over Cellspin at the district court level.
Cellspin sued the companies in 2017 alleging infringement of patents covering the use of Bluetooth technology to upload images and data online from devices such as fitness trackers.
The US District Court for the Northern District of California rejected Cellspin’s claims, finding that the patents were “directed to an abstract idea, namely a method of acquiring, transferring, and publishing data and multimedia content on one or more websites”.
According to the district court’s ruling, the Cellspin patents “merely provide a generic environment in which to carry out” the acquisition and transfer of data, and therefore did not describe an “inventive step” as required under step two of the Supreme Court’s Alice/Mayo test.
On appeal, the Federal Circuit reversed the district court’s ruling, finding that the district court erred in concluding that the patents did not contain an inventive step.
In its decision, the Federal Circuit ruled that “factual disputes about whether an aspect of the claims is inventive may preclude dismissal at the pleadings stage under section 101 [of the Patent Act]”.
According to the petitioners, the Federal Circuit’s reversal of the district court “underscores just how much damage has been done to the Alice framework”.
In its petition for certiorari, Garmin and its co-petitioners argued that the “patent eligibility is a question of law for the court, and the Federal Circuit erred in holding otherwise”.
In a reply to the petitioners, Cellspin argued that if adopted by the Supreme Court, their position would “violate the longstanding, well-founded principle that for motions to dismiss on the pleadings, well-pled facts in the complaint must be accepted as true”.
“Petitioner’s arguments about patent eligibility being a question of law lack clarity, and fail to frame proper issues for review of this case,” Cellspin claimed.
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