Last month, in Creative Technology Ltd. v. International Trade Commission, 2016-2715 (Fed. Cir.), the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld the International Trade Commission's (ITC) determination regarding patent invalidity under the Supreme Court's 2014 decision in Alice Corp. Ptv. Ltd. v. CLS Bank Int'l, 134 S. Ct. 2347 (2014). The patent at issue, U.S. Patent No. 6,928,433, disclosed a user interface for portable media players. The claimed interface utilized an "organizational hierarchy" that organized musical tracks in a series of lists organized by category, subcategory, and item.
The patent owner, Creative Technology Ltd., filed a complaint with the ITC in March 2016, requesting that various electronic device manufacturers be prevented from continuing to import smartphones that it believed incorporated software that infringed the '433 patent.
The ITC denied the complaint on the ground that the '433 patent was invalid. At issue was whether the '433 patent claimed an unpatentable "abstract idea." In evaluating patents that claim an abstract idea, courts consider whether the patent "transforms" the abstract idea into a patent-eligible application by adding an "inventive concept." In Alice, the Supreme Court clarified that in the computer context, an abstract idea is not transformed into a patentable concept merely by adding the instruction to "implement [the] abstract idea on a computer."
The ITC explained that the patent at issue did not claim any concept beyond "the application of known organization methods to the standard functions of portable music players and similar devices"—in other words, that the patent's claims failed under Alice because it merely described an abstract concept's implantation in a generic computer environment. The ITC therefore found that the '433 patent claimed an unpatentable abstract idea. The Federal Circuit affirmed the ITC's decision without explanation.
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