Uniloc can have all the hardware details they like, but if they are not
recited in the claim, they are irrelevant. All that matters is whether
Rackspace/Red Hat are infringing the claim that Uniloc assert. If Uniloc had
technology that displayed genuine ingenuity and invention, and had claimed that
technology in a hardware claim, they could have asserted that claim against
Rackspace/Red Hat. But they didn't. And the fact that they only assert Claim 1
suggests that they did not have anything more significant and innovative to
assert.
And to construe the claim, it is necessary to look to the
language of the claim. What hardware is recited? It is a claim to a method of
processing floating point numbers that involves steps of converting, rounding,
performing and arithmetic computation and converting. It does not even recite
storing the value in a ‘floating-point number memory
register’ or ‘floating-point register’; the claim only recites
manipulating representations of how the number would be stored in such
registers. Such representations could be made, and the steps of the processing
fully carried out, with pencil and paper.
Uniloc recognize that the
process described in the asserted claim can be carried out with pencil and
paper. Which is why they devote section VI of the Plaintiff's surreply
(the last of the motions before the Memorandum Opinion and Order) to an argument
that District Courts have affirmed that Processes that can be carried
out inside a person's head are patentable.
So all the stuff about
the hardware is irrelevant. If some aspect of Rackspace/Red Hat's business
infringed on a hardware claim, then Uniloc would no doubt have asserted it.
Instead they asserted a very broad claim to a principle.
On reading the
Uniloc reply, when they dismissed the idea that the process was a mathematical
algorithm because of the failure to specify the arithmetical computation
involved, I was planning to post a comment to the effect that a mathematical
algorithm (as defined in Benson) was unpatentable, not because it was an
“abstract intellectual concept”, and thus unpatentable as being an
abstract idea. Failure to specify the arithmetical computation only made
the claim even more abstract.
The great thing about the
abstract idea exception is that anything more abstract and general than
an abstract idea must itself be an abstract idea!
Or to put the
point another way, if you have a claim that would read on a claim drawn to law
of nature, natural phenomenon or abstract idea, or an obvious routine
application thereof (that is unpatentable under the doctrine enunciated by the
Supreme Court in Mayo), then the broader claim must also be unpatentable.
It would defy logic if the broader claim were patent-eligible in a situation
where the narrower claim was not.
I can't help thinking that Le Roy v. Tatham, with its dictum that
principles are not patentable, is to the point here. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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