Executive Summary1 min read
Key Takeaways
- In SAP v. Investpic, the Federal Circuit clarified, for the first time, whether a patent claim can lack the “inventive concept” needed to survive Alice’s Step 2 even if the claims are groundbreaking, innovative, or brilliant, and non-obvious.
- The court held that a claim’s “inventive concept” cannot be found within an abstract realm, meaning an improvement to merely abstract math does not satisfy Alice Step 2.
- This decision helps clear up some of the uncertainty that had previously surrounded how courts apply Step 2 of the Alice inquiry to software claims.
The Bottom Line: Being groundbreaking, innovative, or non-obvious is not enough to save a software patent claim under Alice — the inventive concept must lie outside the abstract idea itself, such as an abstract mathematical improvement, to survive Step 2.
Summary: The Federal Circuit burns off some of the fog surrounding software claims at Step 2 of the Alice inquiry.
In this installment of the Post-Alice Software Series, the Federal Circuit burns off some of the fog surrounding software claims at Step 2 of the Alice inquiry.
The case of SAP vs. Investpic appears to directly answer, for the first time, whether a claim can lack the “inventive concept” needed to survive Alice, even though the claims are “groundbreaking, innovative, or even brilliant” as well as non-obvious.
Now we know that an “inventive concept” cannot be found in the non-abstract realm, e.g., the claimed improvement can’t be an improvement to merely abstract “math.”
