Judge dismisses claims on patents for content monitoring

Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter have secured dismissals of specific smartphone related patents that a federal judge said amounted to abstract ideas and didn't necessarily resolve problems.

Palo Alto Research Center, owned by Xerox Corp., accused the three companies of infringing on some of its inventions that made certain digital programs more easier to use, tracked and collected user data and stopped the spread of misinformation by determining the reliability of certain text. Palo Alto Research Center Inc. v. Facebook, Inc., 2:20-CV-19753 (C.D. Cal., filed Nov. 25, 2020).

Facebook is represented by Cooley LLP; Snap Inc. is represented by Paul Hastings LLP and Twitter is represented by Paul Weiss and Bird Marella Boxer Wolpert Nessim Drooks Lincenberg & Rhow.

Palo Alto Research Center is represented by McKool Smith.

In his ruling Tuesday regarding the defendants' motions to dismiss, U.S. District Judge Andre Birotte Jr. of the Central District of California found invalid the asserted claims relating to patent '871, which Palo Alto claimed solved a long-running problem of determining a document's authoritativeness and stopped the spreading of misinformation. Twitter, which was facing '871 infringement claims, contended in court papers the invention was a basic function that could be performed by a human when fact-checking or accessing news articles, research and other texts.

'871 does not show how the invention determines a document's reliability, just that it happens, Twitter argued. Furthermore, fact-checking is an ongoing issue that isn't unique to the internet, the company contended.

Birotte agreed, writing that "automating a process that people do manually (by reading a document to see if it seems well-researched or uses language in a skillful and appropriate way) does not make something patent eligible."

Birotte refused to toss out the '599 patent infringement claims against Facebook and Snap. That patent tracks contextual information to better learn user behavior. That invention in essence can be described as a database of information aggregated from researching users' interests and is often related to targeted advertising.

Birotte said issues of fact exist as to '599 and it is not yet clear whether the claim elements are well understood, routine or conventional. He also declined to dismiss claims related to the '439 patent, which relates to data storing and adapts to a device's location and movement and detects nearby users.

The judge also declined to throw out claims related to patent '781 which relates to personalizing information searches to produce new links and webpages that have not been previously accessed by a user. '781 was supposed to solve the problem of web searches turning up the same information by determining a 'proximal neighborhood' of information that wasn't accessed yet, Palo Alto argued. Twitter contended '781's practice is similar to when a reader asks a librarian for a book recommendation, and their checkout history is analyzed to find a good fit. Palo Alto Research Center v. Twitter, 2:20-CV-10754 (C.D. Cal., filed Nov. 25, 2020).

But Birotte said the invention made distinctions between previously seen and unseen materials, and '781 solved that problem by applying only new material relevant to that user.

"Twitter claims that this method 'can be performed entirely by a human' but Twitter fails to explain how a human could constantly catalog ever-changing content on the internet about an endless number of topics to then provide only new search results within a predetermined degree of relevancy to a particular query," Birotte reasoned.

Twitter and Snap both defeated '362 patent claims, which has to do with tagging or flagging certain text which functions like a digital Post-it Note. Twitter argued the patent could also be performed by simply following instructions and manually sending text to another user. Birotte said '362 was not patent eligible, as it was an abstract idea and didn't show improvement or solutions.

"The Federal Circuit has explained that 'collecting, displaying and manipulating data' is an 'abstract concept,'" Birotte wrote. "Claiming the process of manually adding a piece of metadata to content and disseminating that content according to the instruction provided by the user does not transform the abstract idea of automating content sharing into an inventive concept."