Patent Eligibility of User Interface Inventions
Patent eligibility continues to be a live issue in litigation and patent prosecution, on display yet again in Broadband iTV v. Amazon.com, — F.4th — (Fed. Cir. Sep. 3, 2024) (“BBiTV”). In the BBiTV case, the patents-in-suit related to a user interface for electronic programming guides for televisions. The claims were long. Claim 1, which the parties agreed was representative on the eligibility question, required:
• an Internet-connected device that obtains and presents to a subscriber an electronic program guide as “a templatized video-on-demand display”;
• The “templatized video-on-demand display” to use display templates* “to enable a subscriber using the Internet-connected digital device to navigate in a [hierarchical menu] through titles by category information” using metadata associated with the video content;
• The “templatized video-on-demand display” to be generated in at least three layers—a background layer, a display template layer, and a video-content-and-information layer**.
The claim is a bit of a mess, and my suspicion about prosecution here is that this spent a very long time in prosecution, an examiner finally issued a notice of allowance for the very very long claim, and the patent owner took what he could get. While unfortunate, it’s still often preferable to no patent at all.
On review of this representative claim, the Federal Circuit held at Alice step one that the “claims of the ’026 patent family are directed to receiving metadata and organizing the display of video content based on that metadata.” The court interpreted the claim to be directed to the electronic program guide being updated automatically using metadata from video content provided by a content provider and distinguished similar user-interface cases for having had claims “directed to the features of an improved user interface, including the size and location of the user interface.”
The Federal Circuit also gave laser-focus to what might, in an earlier era, have been known as the “point of novelty” of the claim. BBiTV had argued that the claimed templating system provided sufficient user-interface structure to pass Alice step one, like other user-interface cases. The court did not agree: “While claim 1 does recite a ‘templatized’ video-on-demand display that consists of three layers, the use of templates to create the electronic programming guide is not the claimed advance.” The court provided little reasoning for this assertion, and earlier Federal Circuit decisions once decried this manner of focus in the related obviousness context: “there is no legally recognizable or protected ‘essential,’ ‘gist,’ or ‘heart’ of the invention.” Loctite Corp. v. Ultraseal Ltd., 781 F.2d 861, 875 (Fed. Cir. 1985).
Nevertheless, the court, in my view, reached the right result. The claim seems to be directed to both a user interface and the organization and presentation of data. If the user-interface improvements could stand on their own, though—that is, if they were actually patentable improvements on their own—they would. The claim wouldn’t include substantial limitations directly tying the user interface to the organization of a specific kind of data because patentees generally do not claim more than they need to in the patent prosecution process, and the user-interface is severable enough from organizing video titles that this makes sense here. I can see why the court wouldn’t want to put that reasoning into an opinion—it’s not necessarily a rule you want district courts to follow widely in all cases. But it makes sense in the context of this patent family.
The BBiTV decision provides patent owners, applicants, and litigants an important guidepost on what inventions might be considered patent ineligible concepts of organization and presentation of data.
*The claim is not drafted in a way that makes clear multiple display templates are required. The first limitation of the claim suggests the templated video-on-demand display “uses at least one” of many display templates. A later “wherein” clause requires using the first template for the top-level menu and a second template for the next level in the menu.
**The video-content-and-information layer requires “the associated plurality of images to be displayed…” but this is the claim’s first mention of “images.” It’s an antecedent basis problem and one that probably should have been caught, either by the attorney or the examiner, in prosecution. (The claim’s length can make these sorts of issues harder to spot when you’ve been staring at the words for many hours.) The antecedent “associated plurality of images” falls later in the claim, clarifying that they must be specifically designated by a content provider, along with some other metadata, and a further wherein clause specifies that it’s a title image.