Hundreds celebrate as Texas court invalidates patent
A US judge has invalidated a patent that has been asserted against more than 160 companies.
In a decision handed down at the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Judge Rodney Gilstrap threw out eDekka’s claims of patent infringement.
Gilstrap accepted a motion for summary judgment filed by 3balls.com, one of a reported 168 defendants.
In his order, Gilstrap said the ruling will hand victory to “all defendants who have not settled or been dismissed as of this date and who filed or joined a motion to find the patent-in-suit ineligible for patent protection”.
The patent in question is US number 6,266,674, called: “Random access information retrieval utilising user-defined labels”. The patent’s inventor is named as Donald Hejna and it was bought by eDekka in 2013.
The Texas-based court is generally considered a favourable location for plaintiffs, especially non-practising entities, some of which have been labelled ‘patent trolls’.
In his ruling Gilstrap said the patent covered ineligible subject matter.
“The court finds that no inventive concept exists to transform the claimed abstract idea into a patent-eligible concept,” Gilstrap wrote in his September 21 ruling.
Referencing the US Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Alice v CLS Bank, Gilstrap added that the patent’s claims “amount to nothing significantly more than an instruction to apply the abstract idea of [storing, labelling, and retrieving information] using some unspecified, generic computer”.
