DDR Holdings v. Hotels.com (Fed.Cir.2014)

June 19, 2016

An important Federal Circuit decision came out yesterday, which upheld claims of an Internet related patent as not being directed to an abstract idea. This if the first post-Alice decision to do such.

“As an initial matter, it is true that the claims here are similar to the claims in the cases discussed above in the sense that the claims involve both a computer and the Internet. But these claims stand apart because they do not merely recite the performance of some business practice known from the pre-Internet world along with the requirement to perform it on the Internet. Instead, the claimed solution is necessarily rooted in computer technology in order to overcome a problem specifically arising in the realm of computer networks.” DDR Holdings, LLC v. Hotels.com, L.P. at 20 (Fed.Cir., Dec. 5, 2014).

Accordingly, any invention that is “necessarily rooted in computer technology in order to overcome a problem specifically arising in the realm of computer networks” is patent eligible subject matter.