IP Law Bulletin

Steve Saunders, co-chair of Nutter’s Intellectual Property Department, recently contributed an article to IPWatchdog that analyzed how the pendulum continues to slowly drift toward patentees in this post-Alice world. In the article, “Ancora v HTC: Why You Should Draft Patents That Emphasize Technical Solutions,” Steve addressed the recent ruling Ancora Technologies v HTC America, in which the Federal Circuit reversed a lower court’s invalidity ruling under 35 USC §101 by concluding that Ancora’s claimed subject matter was concrete—not abstract—because it assigned specific functions to specific parts of a computer to improve computer security. According to Steve, this case is yet another in a string of post-Alice cases suggesting that patents should be drafted with an emphasis on the technical problem and technical solution delivered by the claims.