Federal Circuit Creates New (Non-Alice) Hurdle For Software Patents

In the wake of last year's Supreme Court decision in Alice Corp. Pty. Ltd. v. CLS Bank Int'l, 134 S. Ct. 2347 (2014), dozens of courts have declared scores of patents to be invalid as not satisfying the requirements of §101 of the patent statute. The Federal Circuit recently issued a decision that provides the same result but does not rely on the Alice standard and may have a significant and lasting impact on patents for software-related inventions. Allvoice Devs. US, LLC v. Microsoft Corp., No. 2014-1258, 2015 U.S. App. LEXIS 8476 (Fed. Cir. May 22, 2015). In Allvoice, the Federal Circuit declared a patent's claims to be invalid because it simply found them not to be directed to one of the four statutory categories of inventions identified in §101.

The Alice case and its progeny have all relied on certain judicially created exceptions to §101, stating that inventions are not of a patentable type if, for instance, they encompass an abstract idea. Various tests evolved over the past few years, culminating in Alice, to determine whether the claims of a patent fall into one of these judicially created exceptions. In Allvoice, the Federal Circuit took a very different approach.

Judge O'Malley, writing an opinion for a unanimous panel including Judges Prost and Dyk, took a strictly literal reading of §101 and said that if a patent claim does not recite an invention that matches one of the four categories recited therein (i.e., a "process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter"), it is invalid.

For context, the patent at issue is U.S. Patent No. 5,799,273, which carries the somewhat awkward title, "Automated proofreading using interface linking recognized words to their audio data while text is being changed." The patent has 78 claims. Independent claims 1, 52, 69, and 75 are directed to "data processing apparatus." Independent claims 15 and 54 are directed to "a data processing arrangement." Independent claims 28, 56, 71, and 77 are styled as "a data processing method," while independent claims 40 and 58 begin, "a method of processing data." Independent claims 51 and 73 are directed to "a computer usable medium having computer readable instructions." Independent claims 60 and 64 recite "a universal speech-recognition interface."

It is the last of these that the Federal Circuit considered to be outside the ambit of §101. The court began its analysis by stating that, "except for process claims, the eligible subject matter must exist in...