Facts

Trinity Info Media, LLC (Trinity) was the assignee of two patents, both entitled "Poll-based Networking System." In essence, the patents described a system that records a profile from information provided by a user and their responses to questions to match the user with people, goods, products, and services based on similar profiles. Trinity filed a patent infringement suit against Covalent, Inc. for activities it alleged violated its patents.

PLAINTIFF'S CONTENTIONS: Plaintiff contended that defendant had engaged in activities that infringed upon its patents for a poll-based networking system. Specifically, plaintiff contended that defendant had used a data processing system to receive user information to generate a unique profile, provide the user with polling questions, receive and store responses, and compare the selected answers to other users' responses to match similar users together.

DEFENDANT'S CONTENTIONS: Defendant contended that it had not infringed plaintiff's patents; and that plaintiff's patents were invalid for claiming patent-ineligible subject matter. More specifically, defendant contended that plaintiff's patents claimed abstract ideas, which are ineligible for patent protection, by claiming the idea of matching users who gave corresponding answers to a question, and then trying to patent that idea by computerizing that abstract idea.

Result

The court granted defendant's motion to dismiss.

Other Information

Plaintiff's appeal is currently pending.