District Court’s Interpretation of Alice Upheld

A Utah district court got it right when it found in favor of defendant FlexSim, which was being sued for patent infringement by Simio. FlexSim filed to dismiss, arguing that the complaint failed to state a claim upon which relief could be granted because the claims of the patent at issue were ineligible. The court concurred, concluding that contrary to the Alice standards, the claims were directed to “the decades-old computer programming practice of substituting text-based coding with graphical processing,” which the district court determined was an ineligible abstract idea; FlexSim “met its burden of showing no inventive concept or alteration of computer functionality sufficient to transform the system into a patent-eligible application.” The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld the district court on appeal on Dec. 29.