Applicants for software-related patents will be interested
in the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's decision in
the matter of Enfish v. Microsoft Corp., 2015-1244 (Fed.
Cir. May 12, 2016). This decision sheds further light on how
applicants should draft and prosecute patent applications directed
to software in order to increase the likelihood of securing
allowance and overcoming future section 101 attacks by
infringers.
The Enfish Decision
In Enfish, the Federal Circuit considered an appeal
from the Central District of California's decision in
Enfish, LLC v. Microsoft Corp., 56 F. Supp. 3d 1167 (C.D.
Cal. 2014), which found that claims directed to a
"self-referential database" were invalid under 35 U.S.C.
section 101. In other words, the court held that the claims were
not patent eligible because the claims were directed to an abstract
idea, not a tangible invention. The patents claimed an improvement
over the relational database model that allows storing
