Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued an opinion in Contour IP Holding LLC v. GoPro, Inc., Nos. 2022-1654, -1691 (Sept. 9, 2024), reversing the District Court for the Northern District of California’s summary judgment holding that Contour’s point-of-view video camera patents were invalid as directed to patent-ineligible subject matter.
Contour sued GoPro in 2015, alleging that GoPro infringed U.S. Patent Nos. 8,890,954 and 8,896,694, which are directed to portable video cameras that capture a scene from a user’s point-of-view (“POV”). Following claim construction, GoPro filed a motion for summary judgment that the asserted patents were invalid as directed to patent-ineligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The district court applied the two-step Alice test and granted the motion. At Alice step one, the district court determined that the claims were directed to the abstract idea of “creating and transmitting video (at two different resolutions) and adjusting the video’s settings remotely.” At Alice step two, the district court concluded that the claims recite only functional language with “no indication that the physical components are behaving in any way other than their basic, generic tasks.” The district court entered judgment for GoPro, and Contour appealed.
The Federal Circuit reversed, explaining that the district court had characterized the claims “at an impermissibly high level of generality.” The Court held that the claims were directed to patent-eligible subject matter under Alice step one because they recite a “specific improved POV camera” through the requirements “that the claimed POV camera processor be configured to record low and high-quality data streams in parallel, followed by the low-quality data stream’s wireless transfer to a remote device.” As a result, the claims “provide a technological improvement to the real time viewing capabilities of a POV camera’s recordings on a remote device.” The Court explained that under the district court’s claim construction, which requires that the multiple video streams be recorded “in parallel,” the claims do not cover any other ways that a camera processor might generate multiple video streams. Due to this limitation, the claims were properly “directed to a specific means that improves the relevant technology.” Because the claims recite patent eligible subject matter at Alice step one, the Court did not reach Alice step two and remanded for further proceedings.
