A weekly summary of the precedential patent-related opinions
issued by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and the
opinions designated precedential or informative by the Patent Trial
and Appeal Board.
PersonalWeb Technologies LLC, et al. v. Google LLC,
et al., Nos. 2020-1543,
-1553, -1554 (Fed. Cir. (N.D. Cal.) Aug. 12, 2021). Opinion by
Prost, joined by Lourie and Reyna.
The Federal Circuit affirmed the district court's decision
granting judgment on the pleadings that various claims in three
PersonalWeb patents were ineligible for patenting, and therefore
invalid, under 35 U.S.C. § 101.
The patents relate to "data-processing systems that assign
each data item a substantially unique name that depends on the
item's content—a content-based identifier." The
identifiers are generated by a mathematical algorithm, and the
identifier changes when the data item's content changes. The
patent claims are directed to "using such identifiers to
perform various
