Ensuring Patent's claims to be "Directed To" Tech Advancement: ENCO case

Ensuring Patent's claims to be "Directed To" Tech Advancement: ENCO case

Claims of ENCO's U.S Patent No. 7,047,191 were held to be invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101 concerning it be directed to an abstract idea. The plaintiff, in this case, is Enco System Inc. who filed an infringement suit against DaVincia LLC.

The Present case involves ENCO's U.S Patent No. 7,047,191 which is a method of providing the captioning in an audio-visual signal of which Claim 1 includes limitation such as

• Selecting the number of lines of caption data to be displayed (I have an image below showing how my phone does this).

• Determining the caption encoder system being used

• Training the system to on new words;

• Using AV cues to time the captioning so that it displays at the appropriate time.

The District Court while delving into the case found that claim limitation written in a generalized form which uses "broad form functional terminology." Therefore, the court forms an opinion that the claim limitation does not show any such concrete configuration that could serve to ground the abstract idea and just found the claims directed to the abstract idea of "automated stenography implemented on a computer."

The patents are granted on the premise that the inventor has provided some advance through the invention over the prior art. The court looks into the claims and specifications searching the objective suggestions, where the court found that the patent claims are improperly "directed to" an abstract idea. The court quoted Affinity Labs of Tex., LLC v. DIRECTV, LLC, 838 F.3d 1253 (Fed. Cir. 2016) and remarked that the patent document asserts as the "focus of the claimed advance over the prior art."

While observing the patent claims the court held that the focus "is simply the abstract idea of automating the AV-captioning process." Even if the invention involves computers, it is not directed to "any specific improved computer techniques for performing those functions-functions intrinsic to the concept of AV captioning." The court noted that the invention simply provides automation of work previously done by humans and hence nothing new.

The court writes, "The advance is only at the abstract level of computerization because claim 1 fails to set forth specific techniques for processing the data, instead of reciting known computer techniques for automation of known processes." Moving further the court also remarked that "The claims do not incorporate anything more beyond conventional computing hardware and software, which do not transform the subject matter into an eligible application of the abstract idea."