CAFC Affirms Obviousness of Vehicle ID Claims, Finds Substitute Claims Ineligible Under Section 101

Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a ruling in Rideshare Displays, Inc. v. Squires affirming decisions by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that Rideshare’s patent claims to systems and methods of vehicle identification were obvious over prior art. The Federal Circuit’s decision also reversed the PTAB’s partial grant of Rideshare’s motions to amend, finding the substitute claims’ subject matter did not provide a technological solution rendering the claims patent-eligible at Step Two of the Alice/Mayo patent eligibility framework.

Signal Represents Indicators Under Plain Meaning of Claim’s Grammatical Construction

The present appeal follows final written decisions from the PTAB in inter partes review (IPR) proceedings challenging claims from five patents owned by Rideshare, including U.S. Patent No. 9892637 and U.S. Patent No. 10559199, both titled Vehicle Identification System. The specification common to each of those patents indicates that the invention improves safety in rideshare systems by providing a notification signal with identifying indicators, such as a display icon or alphanumeric string, allowing the rider to locate both the rideshare car and its driver. The PTAB invalidated patent claims challenged by rideshare provider Lyft over a series of prior art disclosing taxi and car rental systems using visual indicators on user devices or the vehicle itself.

Although the PTAB invalidated every claim challenged by Lyft, the Board granted motions to amend filed by Rideshare in the IPR proceedings on the ‘637 and ‘199 patents. Those motions included substitute claims introducing a “creating an indicator specific to a user and driver match” limitation during the claimed indicatory signal generation step. Lyft challenged the PTAB’s grant of Rideshare’s motions to amend at the Federal Circuit on cross-appeal, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) intervened for the limited purpose of addressing the appeal’s 35 U.S.C. § 101 patent eligibility issues.

On appeal, Rideshare raised four challenges to the PTAB’s patentability determinations, one of which targeted the Board’s claim construction. The PTAB concluded that the term “generate” had the plain and ordinary meaning “which is to originate or produce the signal.” Rideshare argued that, because a new indicator is created whenever a signal is generated, the term “generate” must modify both the signal and indicator. However, the CAFC found that the proper grammatical construction of the full language, “generate a signal representing an indicator,” plainly means that the signal represents the indicator, which is not generated separately.

Moving on to challenges to the PTAB’s prior art determinations, the Federal Circuit found substantial evidence that U.S. Patent Application No. 20120137256 (“Lalancette”) disclosed a “communication device associated with the driver of a vehicle.” The CAFC found that Lalancette’s specification made clear that its claimed “mobile computer” in a taxi receiving dispatch information could include cell phones or smartphones. Further, Lalancette’s mobile computer connects to a dashboard providing the driver with information, meeting the “associated with the driver” limitation of Rideshare’s patents.

Substitute Claims Reversed Under Independent Section 101, Written Description Grounds

The Federal Circuit also dispatched challenges to prior art determinations involving U.S. Patent Application No. 20150332425 (“Kalanick”) in combination with U.S. Patent No. 9494938 (“Kemler”). First, the CAFC found that Kemler’s centralized system that sends a signal when a vehicle is within a certain distance from a user, in combination with the “first signal”/”notification signal” transmitted by Kalanick’s on-demand transport service system, met Rideshare’s claimed “[notification] signal . . . when [a] vehicle is within a predetermined distance from a specific location.” Further, the appellate court nixed Rideshare’s argument that Kalanick required a direct link between a user-specified output configuration determination step and signal transmission, the Federal Circuit instead finding that this intermediary step did not disrupt the causal chain of Kalanick’s signal generation and transmission.

Addressing Lyft’s cross-appeal, the CAFC disagreed with the PTAB’s finding that Rideshare’s substitute claims provided a technological solution to a technological problem in computer and network technologies. The Federal Circuit found that the substitute claims are directed to improvements of user experience while using a computer application, which are patent-ineligible under appellate case law including Simio v. FlexSim Software Products (2020). “The claims use technology as a tool to streamline the process of what is normally accomplished by creating hand-printed cards with names to help identify ride pickups at crowded locations, such as an airport,” the CAFC found, adding in a footnote that it declined to adopt the USPTO’s three-pronged framework in the agency’s 2019 Revised Subject Matter Eligibility Guidelines used by the PTAB in assessing Section 101 eligibility for Rideshare’s substitute claims.

Although Rideshare’s motion to amend was reversed on the independent Section 101 ground, the Federal Circuit also found the substitute claims unsupported by Rideshare’s original disclosure. In another footnote, the CAFC noted this disclosure merely identified alternative scenarios where indicatory signals are generated either based on location or manually by a driver. As such, the specification didn’t support generating a new indicator when a vehicle is within a predetermined distance, providing another independent ground for reversal.

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Author: billperry