US court decides roof repair patent dispute
A US district court has ruled in favour of an aerial imagery provider, Eagle View Technologies, after a competitor sought to invalidate its patents for lacking an inventive concept.
In September 2015, Eagle View Technology filed a complaint alleging that Xactware Solutions, a subsidiary of data analytics firm Verisk Analytics, had infringed six of its patents.
The patents in dispute cover “business methods, systems and computer readable storage media for providing a roof repair estimate”.
Xactware denied infringement and sought to invalidate 11 claims in the six patents. Xactware said the claims were patent ineligible as they were “abstract ideas” that lacked an inventive concept.
On Tuesday, January 29, the US District Court for the District of New Jersey dismissed Xactware’s motion to invalidate the patents. It said Xactware had failed to demonstrate by “clear and convincing evidence” that the relevant claims are “directed to an abstract idea or embody no inventive concept”.
In its judgment, the court applied the two-step test set forth by the US Supreme Court in Alice Corp v CLS Bank International.
In its argument, Xactware said the patent claims recite the abstract idea of “using photogrammetry to calculate roof slope and other geometric measurements of a building, and then to generate a roof report from the calculations”. It argued that the patented method was “merely a computerised routine of what a human could do”.
Additionally, Xactware claimed that Eagle View’s patented claims add “nothing to solve the problem of creating a roof estimate report” apart from a computer.
Eagle View said Xactware’s analysis was incorrect. It said the human mind cannot perform the claimed steps, in particular, “the generation of a 3D model of two or more correlated but different views of a roof”.
It said its invention was a new computerised method of generating roof reports which was an improvement over manual report creation.
Eagle View also said the specific claims in its patents were improvements to the prior art, and therefore were an inventive step.
In its judgment, the court agreed with Eagle View. It said the claims in Eagle View’s patents do not merely replace a human’s sketch of a roof section from different aerial views, but provide an improvement to the prior art.
It added that Xactware’s characterisation of Eagle View’s invention “oversimplifies the claims”, which are “more specific and concrete, and hence present a technological improvement”.
The court noted that Eagle View’s creation of a roof model by calculating roof geometry like pitch, area and perimeter is a “technological solution” as it solves the specific problem of generating a roof repair estimate without direct human measurement of a roof.
Therefore, it concluded that the asserted claims are an improvement to prior art and the asserted claims are eligible for patentability.
Kirkland & Ellis represented Eagle View in the dispute.
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