Meta wins patent clash over Facebook News Feed
Judge Newman affirms lower court’s decision to invalidate a patent covering web browsing habits | Patent owner originally sued Facebook, claiming the 'News Feed' feature infringed its user-experience technology.
Meta has prevailed in a US Court of Appeals following a dispute brought by the owner of a patent that it alleged had been infringed by Facebook’s ‘News Feed’ feature.
USC IP Partnership (USC) originally sued Facebook, Meta’s former name, in 2021 for alleged infringement in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas, claiming that the social media site’s ‘News Feed’ (now called 'Feed') infringed US patent 8,645,300.
Entitled “System and Method for Intent Data Processing”, the patent—owned by USC—relates to a method for predicting which web pages to recommend to a visitor based on inferences of their “intent”.
Judge Alan Albright had granted Meta’s move for summary judgment to invalidate all 17 of the asserted claims of the patent, on the ground that they are ineligible for patenting.
In a non-precedential opinion handed down yesterday, August 30, Circuit Judge Pauline Newman affirmed that decision.
Abstract concept
Citing Alice, which introduced a two-step analysis of patentability, Newman ruled that the patent, whose claims describe a so-called “intent engine”, was invalid due to its abstract concept.
Newman pointed out that at Alice step one, the district court found that the patent’s claims “are directed to the abstract idea of ‘collecting, analysing and using intent data’”, drawing an analogy to the claims invalidated in Electric Power Group v Alstom, 2016.
And at Alice step two, the district court found that the patent’s claims do not “recite any elements, when considered individually or ‘as an ordered combination,’ [that] contain anything ‘significantly more’ than the abstract idea itself.”
Newman also noted that the district court did not accept USC’s position that the “intent engine serves a role that is not conventional, generic, or well-known”, instead holding that it “is a purely functional ‘black box’ implemented using standard cloud platforms from well-known vendors.”
‘No concrete facts’
USC had argued that the claims presented a “unique and novel way of delivering web pages to consumers that was not previously demonstrated in the prior art”, but Judge Albright had found this testimony was not “backed by any concrete facts from the specification or the prior art”.
Ninety-six-year-old Newman—who was the first judge appointed directly to the Federal Circuit—wrote in this week’s opinion: “We agree with the district court that the idea of using computers to predict the intent of visitors is insufficient to render the idea non-abstract.
“We have considered USC’s remaining arguments and deem them unpersuasive. The district court’s analysis and decision conform to law and precedent. Thus we affirm the ruling that claims 1–17 of the ’300 patent are invalid.”
Counsel for USC was led by Todd Landis, of Williams Simons & Landis; and counsel for Meta was led by Heidi Keefe of Cooley.
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