Federal Circuit Affirms Win for Meta Against Patent Owner’s Alleged Infringement of Image Tagging Patents

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Tuesday affirmed a district court’s decision to grant a motion to dismiss a patent infringement case against Meta and Instagram due to patent ineligibility. The CAFC also granted Meta’s motion to partially dismiss the appeal for mootness because the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) separately invalidated all of the asserted claims except for one. The opinion was authored by Judge Cunningham.

The patents in suit—U.S. Patent Nos. 9,959,291; 8,954,432; 10,417,275; and 10,628,480—are owned by Angel Technologies Group, LLC and relate to ways of “digitally tagging images.” Angel sued Meta in 2021, and Meta subsequently filed a motion to dismiss, arguing the claims were ineligible for patent protection under Section 101. The district court granted the motion and dismissed the case with prejudice.

After Angel appealed and the CAFC heard oral argument, the PTAB found all of the asserted claims but one invalid as obvious in parallel inter partes review (IPR) proceedings. “Because these claims have been found unpatentable and the time to appeal the Final Written Decisions has expired, there is no longer a case or controversy as to those claims,” wrote the CAFC, granting the motion to dismiss as moot.

With only claim 15 of the ‘291 patent remaining at issue, the CAFC went on to conduct a patent eligibility analysis under Alice v. CLS Bank as to that claim. While Angel also argued that the district court had erred in treating claim 6 of the ’432 patent as representative of all other claims, both the district court and the CAFC held that, even an independent review of claim 15 found it patent ineligible. The claim “relates to inserting a specific digital image into an identified user’s photo album” and depends from two other claims the CAFC found abstract. The opinion explained that the claims collectively merely invoke computers as a tool instead of being directed to a specific improvement in the way they operate:

“But collecting photos in a photo album is a patent-ineligible idea and sending information in response to an input (i.e., ‘adding . . . image data from the digital image to the photo album’ ‘in response to receiving [an] input’) does not make the idea less abstract.”

At step two, Angel attempted to point in part to industry praise as proof of an inventive concept demonstrating the claims were not “well-understood, routine, or conventional.” But the CAFC said Angel’s evidence of industry articles that praised the benefits of tagging photos amounted to nothing more than “the abstract idea itself, not any specific technological improvement that Angel made or claimed.”

Finally, the opinion said the district court’s decision to dismiss the complaint with prejudice was not error because it agreed that “leave to amend would be futile.” The decision was thus affirmed as to claim 15’s ineligibility and Meta’s motion to dismiss as moot was granted as to all remaining claims.