Aviation Capital Partners v. SH Advisors, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the ineligibility of claims directed to determining the taxability status of aircraft based on flight data. The panel upheld the district court's Rule 12 dismissal of infringement claims tied to U.S. Patent No. 10,956,988, finding the asserted claims ineligible under Section 101.
The '988 patent covered a computer-implemented method for pulling air traffic control data, detecting gaps in the available information, layering in transponder data (e.g., altitude and speed), inferring landings during data outages and computing a taxability status. In other words: collect, analyze, conclude.
At Alice step one, both the Federal Circuit and district court agreed that the claims were directed to the abstract idea of collecting aircraft-related data from multiple sources and using an algorithm to improve what can be gleaned from the data, then referring to another database to determine taxability. The district court likened the claims to those in Electric Power Group, brushing aside the plaintiff's argument that determining "taxability status" saved the day. That, the court said, boils down to looking at tax codes and "using a computer to make this easier does not make it less abstract."
Step two didn't fare any better. The idea of detecting a landing based on altitude and speed was not an inventive concept, and the Federal Circuit agreed that the claims merely "automate or otherwise make efficient traditional methods."
One interesting note: The appellant also argued that the district court "was required to assume as true the Patent Office's factual finding that the claims were integrated into a practical application and contained significantly more than an abstract idea." The Federal Circuit rejected this argument because the complaint didn't include these allegations: "Here, the complaint included no factual findings made by the Patent Office." And, accordingly, "the district court did not err by declining to accept as true any unalleged factual findings that the Patent Office may have made in its § 101 eligibility analysis." Would these allegations have saved the patent at the R. 12 stage? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The representative claim is pasted below:
A computer-implemented method, comprising:
obtaining traffic control system information for an aircraft from a first database, the traffic control system information indicative of departures and arrivals of the aircraft at a plurality of airports;
detecting a gap in the traffic control system information for the aircraft, the gap being indicative of a time for which a location of the aircraft is indeterminate based upon the traffic control system information, wherein the gap is detected based on a mismatch in the traffic control system information between a departure location of the aircraft and a previous arrival location of the aircraft;
receiving transponder data from a transponder that is mounted on board the aircraft by way of a transceiver positioned in proximity to an airport, the transponder data indicative of at least one of an altitude or a speed of the aircraft;
determining, based upon the at least one of the altitude or the speed of the aircraft indicated in the transponder data, that the aircraft landed at the airport during the time for which the location of the aircraft was indeterminate; and
computing, by a computer, a taxability status of the aircraft based upon the aircraft being present at the airport during the time for which the location of the aircraft was indeterminate.
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