In a brief § 101 opinion today, Judge Andrews denied a MTD based solely on Alice step 2. He relied primarily on allegations in the complaint that various claimed features of the invention were not routine or conventional:
Plaintiff . . . alleges in its amended complaint that the [asserted] claims incorporate “inventive concepts that were not well-understood, routine, or conventional at the time” of invention. . . . For example, the amended complaint alleges that some claims teach ways of displaying performance parameters so that users of both live and archived classes can compete with one another. . . . The amended complaint alleges that these functionalities were nonroutine and unconventional at the time of the invention and helped to solve the problem of “rider boredom.” . . . Further, Plaintiff alleges that several claims teach the implementation of competitive performance parameters by time-synchronization mechanisms that were not well-understood, routine, or conventional at the time of the invention.
He did not agree that the complaint needed citations to the specification:
The fact that Plaintiff’s amended complaint does not contain citations to the specification does not preclude my finding that the complaint plausibly alleges an inventive concept.
He likewise rejected the idea that the body of the specification must list the reasons that the invention is unconventional (as opposed to just the claims):
The fact that the specification does not “expressly list all the reasons why this claimed [invention] is unconventional” is also of no relevance, because the claims of the patents at issue recite the aspects that Plaintiff alleges in the amended complaint make them inventive.
This short opinion stands out for relying repeatedly on the allegations in the complaint, but overall it is consistent with other recent Judge Andrews decisions. He has previously granted § 101 motions to dismiss where the claims themselves do not recite the inventive aspects, such as in Rondevoo Techs., LLC v. Aernos, Inc., C.A. No. 19-680-RGA, D.I. 26, at 1-3, 13 (Mar. 24, 2020) (which I discussed in a Law360 article):
While Plaintiff’s counsel emphasized the sensor’s “physical tangible elements” as carrying the “weight” of the claims at oral argument, there is not a single technical improvement that is claimed in the asserted patents, and the claimed components are described based on their functions rather than on specific improvements in hardware or any technical explanation as to how to implement them in an inventive way.
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