Judge Andrews granted a motion to dismiss on § 101 grounds on Friday in Aviation Capital Partners v. SH Advisors, LLC, C.A. No. 22-1556-RGA (D. Del.).
The case involved a patent that the patent office had determined was patent eligible, after he examiner addressed and ultimately rejected patent ineligibility under § 101.
Judge Andrews was undeterred from re-examining eligibility:
I give no weight to the Patent Office's overall determination that the patent was eligible (which determination the PTO makes either expressly or impliedly for every issued patent), even if the PTO considered the cases being cited here.
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[As to the presence of an inventive concept] I again give no weight to the conclusions of the PTO.
This makes sense, in my view. I've heard that patent examiners are incentivized to grant patents. The Court ultimately found the patent to be ineligible under § 101.
The patent claimed a method for figuring out whether an aircraft should be taxed by using data about where it went:
In broad strokes, the '988 patent concerns using Air Traffic Control data from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), supplemented with data from airplane transponders, to learn where an airplane has landed for some period of time. . . . This information may be useful to state and local governments because the aircraft may be subject to property tax based on its situs, or presence in a particular location for some time. The FAA database may contain gaps where tax status is not tracked. . . . By combining the FAA data with the transponder data which reports an aircraft's speed and altitude, however, the patented invention obtains a more complete picture of where an aircraft has been. . . . By further comparing this information with a database on taxability, it is possible to determine the taxes the owner of an aircraft might owe that could not be gleaned from the FAA data alone.
The Court found that these claims are directed to an abstract idea:
As I indicated at oral argument, I think the '988 patent is directed to an abstract idea. I characterized the idea as "collecting aircraft-related data from multiple sources and using an algorithm to improve . . . what can be gleaned from the data, and then referring to yet another database about taxation to determine the taxability status." . . . This is an abstract idea akin to that in Elec. Power. As I also noted at oral argument, this case differs from TaKaDu in that the method observes transponder data without actually using it to affect the aircraft locations or the taxes levied on them. . . . Even accepting Plaintiff's argument that the patent is directed to "determining taxability status," the determination of taxability status is also an abstract idea-as the Patent Office recognized. Determining a taxability status is simply a matter of referring to various tax codes, and using a computer to make this easier does not make it less abstract.
Judge Andrews likewise found no inventive concept, just a common-sense application of off-the-shelf technology:
The specific step of "determining that an aircraft landed at an airport based on speed or altitude data during a time when the location of the aircraft is indeterminate" that Plaintiff points to does not constitute an inventive concept. It is simply an application of common sense and physics. As Defendant notes, the claims do not "require[] anything other than off-the-shelf conventional . . . technology." . . . Despite having a practical application, the claims of the patent offer no new insights or improvements for implementing their abstract idea. Instead, the patent seems merely to "stat[e] the [abstract idea] while adding the words 'apply it."'
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