Today, there's another signal that the days of "do it on a computer" patents may finally be numbered—at least if a defendant is willing to last through an appeal.
In an opinion (PDF) published this morning, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a lower court's decision to invalidate two patents, numbered 6,398,646 and 6,656,045, claiming to cover computerized bingo.
Yes, you read that right: bingo.
"Generally, the claims recite storing a player's preferred sets of bingo numbers; retrieving one such set upon demand, and playing that set; while simultaneously tracking the player's sets, tracking player payments, and verifying winning numbers," explained the three-judge panel. "Variants between the claims include display capabilities and options to purchase sets of bingo numbers."
The case originated with a dispute between two competitors, Planet Bingo and Video King, both of which provide electronic bingo services to casinos and other clients.
The earlier of the two patents was filed in 2000 and granted in 2002. Both were originally granted to a company called Melange Computer Services, and sold to Planet Bingo in 2006.
Planet Bingo sued Video King in 2012, and in 2013—a full year before the US Supreme Court decided the pivotal Alice v. CLS Bank case—the district court judge tossed out the patents, finding them abstract because bingo management "consists solely of mental steps which can be carried out by a human using pen and paper."
The attempts by Planet Bingo lawyers to dress the claims up in computer language didn't help. "[I]n real world use, literally thousands, if not millions of preselected Bingo numbers are handled by the claimed computer program," they wrote. The patented invention included "complex computer code with three distinct subparts."
The three-judge panel wasn't impressed, noting that the patent claims didn't require a grand scale, needing at most "two sets of Bingo numbers," "a player," and "a manager."
As with Alice, "the function performed by the computer at each step of the process is purely conventional," wrote US Circuit Judge Todd Hughes, writing for a unanimous three-judge panel.
Planet Bingo didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on its case.
The computer bingo case is one a few notable post-Alice slapdowns of abstract patents by the Federal Circuit, a specialized appeals court that has sometimes been criticized as too easy on patent owners. In July, the court tossed out a digital imaging patent that originated with Polaroid, but was sold to a large-scale "patent troll." Earlier this month, the court handed a loss to patent troll Vringo on different grounds, with a concurring opinion mentioning Alice v. CLS Bank.
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