In the nearly three years since Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Int’l, 134 S. Ct. 2347 (2014), the Federal Circuit has analyzed the issue of patent-eligibility in the context of numerous distinct technologies. The court’s precedent applying Alice addresses patents directed to financial services, Internet content filtering, database maintenance, payment-based content access, animated facial gesturing, physical object tracking, distributed data processing, and more. One takeaway is that no technological discipline is, per se, eligible or ineligible. Instead, the outcomes of these cases are better explained by the specific inventions at issue and how they are claimed. RecogniCorp, LLC v. Nintendo Co., Ltd., No. 2016-1499 (Fed. Cir. Apr. 28, 2017), confirms this lesson.
