The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California
agreed with Synchronoss. Dropbox appealed, and the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Federal Circuit addressed all three patents in
turn.
Patent 1: Secure Delivery of Information in a Network
For the Secure Delivery patent, the federal circuit agreed with
the district court that the representative claim was directed to
"(1) associating a security level with a data resource, (2)
associating a security level with a mode of identification of a
user, and then (3) ensuring that the user's security level is
sufficiently high to meet the security level of the data resource
to access the data resource." This constituted an abstract
idea. Both courts agreed that the claim did not provide any limits
that curb how the apparatus performed the functions and, instead,
invoked computers to execute data access control principles.
