Federal Circuit rules against Google in patent challenge
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit yesterday ruled against a patent challenge brought forward by Google.
The search engine claimed that Network-1 Technologies’ US patent number 8,904,464, known as “Method for tagging an electronic media work to perform an action”, was unpatentable.
The ‘464 patent covers a computer system that allows the user to receive media work alongside a tag identifying the media work and a related action to be performed.
According to Network-1, Google argued at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that the covered business method (CBM) patent was unpatentable in April 2015.
However, the PTAB said that claims 1 to 34 were not unpatentable, and in its decision, the board considered the construction of the term “machine-readable instructions”, as covered by the patent and recited in all of the claims.
The PTAB ruled that, based on the evidence and arguments of the parties, the term would have been understood as “code or pseudocode that is executable by a computer processor”.
In its decision the Federal Circuit said there was no error in the claim construction and affirmed the PTAB’s ruling.
The decision to rule in favour of Network-1 was welcomed by the company.
Corey Horowitz, chairman and CEO, said: “We are extremely pleased with the decision of the Federal Circuit. We have worked very hard with Professor Ingemar Cox to develop and protect the value of his inventions and we will continue to do so.”
Network-1 is a business that works alongside individual inventors and corporate and academic patent owners to develop and license IP assets.
Cox, a professor of telecommunications and head of the media futures research group at University College London, is one of the inventors who works alongside Network-1.
In April 2017, WIPR reported that Google tried to revive a decision before the Federal Circuit that set limits on which patents fall within the scope of the CBM review regime.
Google’s appeal for the court to rehear en banc the November 2016 decision, which had vacated the invalidation of a patent owned by technology company and licensing platform Unwired Planet, was denied.
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