[00:00:01] Speaker 01:
Our next case is in Raid Tarasenko 19-1453.

[00:00:53] Speaker 01:
Mr. Barr, you have reserved your time.

[00:00:57] Speaker 01:
You have reserved three minutes for everybody.

[00:01:00] Speaker 01:
Yes.

[00:01:00] Speaker 01:
Okay, you may begin, sir.

[00:01:02] Speaker 02:
May I please the court?

[00:01:04] Speaker 02:
The examiner's final rejection in this appeal is a rejection of the claims as being directed to non-patentable subject matter under Section 101.

[00:01:16] Speaker 02:
The examiner's final rejection was erroneous and should be reversed for at least two reasons.

[00:01:23] Speaker 02:
First, the claim invention, as properly understood, is directed to our improved method of delivering transit time information rather than any abstract idea of determining that transit time information.

[00:01:40] Speaker 01:
So you would agree that claim three is directed to looking up transit times?

[00:01:46] Speaker 02:
We agree that claim three recites the step of looking up transit time information.

[00:01:54] Speaker 01:
Why is that not abstract?

[00:01:57] Speaker 02:
Well, that is not the invention.

[00:02:03] Speaker 02:
During the prosecution and the rejection, it was agreed that that was a prior art step.

[00:02:09] Speaker 01:
Just stepping back and going to the first step and trying to determine what the claims are directed to.

[00:02:17] Speaker 01:
Yes.

[00:02:18] Speaker 01:
And you agree that claim three is directed to looking up transit times.

[00:02:27] Speaker 02:
Well, it recites the step of looking up transit time information.

[00:02:33] Speaker 01:
My question to you is why is that not an abstract idea, just the idea of looking up a transit time?

[00:02:42] Speaker 02:
We agree that looking up or calculating the transit time information can be an abstract idea.

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For example, one could claim that they had an improved method of utilizing weather information or traffic.

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in calculating the transit time information.

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And therefore, they have an improved method of doing that and looking up and calculating that transit time information.

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It's clear here that that's not what claim three is directed to.

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When that step is recited of looking up the transit time information, it's a predicatory step so that we have antecedent basis for limitations that appear later in the claim.

[00:03:27] Speaker 02:
So, if the claim three, for example, recited

[00:03:35] Speaker 02:
a method of providing transit time information comprising receiving weather information, receiving transit information, looking up transit schedules, and calculating there from a transit time information, then the claim would be directed towards an abstract idea.

[00:03:55] Speaker 01:
But aren't you just describing just fundamental logistical inquiries?

[00:04:04] Speaker 02:
The claims do not.

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In the technical limitations, the claims do not.

[00:04:12] Speaker 02:
In the step one of the Alice analysis, you look at the invention as it is claimed and what the inventors claim to have contributed.

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It's hard to reclaim anything without having some predatory steps or some predatory acknowledged prior art limitations.

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And I think the key of course is to identify what is the abstract idea and that's a difficult thing to do.

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That's why I think I contrast

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Claim three as it is in the appeal with the one that I just recited, which would be an example.

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And I think that's very close to the example of St.

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Bilsky, where the invention and the contribution made by the inventors was in the nature of an algorithm or an abstract idea.

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How do we better deliver this?

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How would we better calculate this or look this up?

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And I think there's a little bit of confusion because patent officers say that we admit that that's abstract and we're just trying to illustrate for the court what I think is the dividing line between the abstract idea of our claims and what the invention is.

[00:05:37] Speaker 02:
There is no claim, and it never has been in any of the claims, starting from the original claims, an improved method of calculating that transit time information.

[00:05:48] Speaker 02:
The claims are directed to how you best deliver that information between technical systems from one party to the other.

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And that was the basis for our claims, and that's what we assert that the invention is.

[00:06:05] Speaker 03:
What limitations specifically would you point us to in Claim 3 for what you're contending is the technical improvement of communicating that information?

[00:06:16] Speaker 02:
There's a combination of limitations that distinguish over the prior art method which we acknowledge in the specification was having a server with serving a website.

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You would go to that website, log in and obtain the information.

[00:06:31] Speaker 02:
Our invention utilizes a web services interface that is part of an online logistics system which receives requests from an ERP system, processes those requests by calculating or looking up transit time information in a database and then returning a response back to the ERP system.

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is the online logistics system which has that web services interface.

[00:07:02] Speaker 03:
So having a separate entity to provide the lookup time.

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Well, I think the main feature is the web services interface.

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And you'll see that there's also limitations which, again, contrast with the conventional method of using a server.

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That's the classic Alice test.

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This is something which is conventional.

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You do it on the internet via computer.

[00:07:28] Speaker 02:
That's correct.

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But we don't do that.

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We have a very specific online logistics system.

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And the web services interface itself

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is very specific using a new technology that had only recently been introduced.

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But is that in the claim?

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Yes, yes it is.

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The claims are out to the

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It's providing the second step of providing a web services interface to set online logistics system.

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which is separate from a basic HTTP authentication.

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Said web services interface requiring that web service requests include a client credential parameter, which is different than any parameter used by the basic HTTP authentication.

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So that makes it clear that this is not a traditional web server that uses HTTP for delivering the transit time information.

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that web services interface has to receive a web service request from an ERP system and then return the answer to that request to the ERP system.

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Now, the other part of this that is new is that ERP systems did not previously have this ability to issue web service requests.

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We in the invention, as part of the invention, say that the ERP system should be modified to be able to deliver those web service requests.

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In the appendix to the application... Can you tell us what is advantageous about the ERP system?

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The ERP system, utilizing the ERP system, is the system that traditionally

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stores and maintains information relating to inventory levels, warehouse usage, supply chain information, manufacturing resources.

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Yeah, so a lot of organizations will have that, particularly manufacturers.

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But they don't have anything relating to a way to get transit time information into that system.

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The conventional method was to have a human being

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go somehow get that transit information either by calling or perhaps looking it up on a website, getting that information and then inputting that into the ERP system.

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This system allows that to occur automatically by virtue of these web service requests.

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So there's an advantage that it does not require human interaction.

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There's an advantage that it happens instantaneously.

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There's an advantage that the information relating to the transit time information, it does not have to be in the ERP system.

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It can be in the online logistics system, and then when the web service request arrives, it simply looks up that information and returns it.

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The part of this is,

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Even though I hope I've explained that to your satisfaction, it's not quite that easy to do in practice.

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Web services were only developed in approximately 2004.

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The effective priority of this application is February 10, 2005.

[00:11:18] Speaker 02:
So getting on to step two of Alice, the web services interface in no way is a

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well-known routine or conventional technical system.

[00:11:50] Speaker 03:
Well, it is a reference to web services.

[00:11:58] Speaker 02:
I think the tricky part is that web services were prior art.

[00:12:04] Speaker 02:
Okay, and we refer to that prior art.

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And so you can look up, for example, what you have to provide for that web services interface.

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And it's in the appendix to the application containing an example of a web services interface with the code.

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And it's unusual to provide that, but it was provided on pages 120 to 122

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of the appendix, you have that specific implementation of a web services interface for this application because it relates to transit time information.

[00:12:44] Speaker 02:
You can use web services for movie schedules, all kinds of information that would require a slightly different interface in terms of the fields and the formats of the information that's being exchanged.

[00:12:58] Speaker 02:
Just because web services were previously known in prior heart does not mean that they were well-known, routine, and conventional.

[00:13:08] Speaker 01:
Mr. Bauer, you're into your rebuttal time.

[00:13:10] Speaker 01:
You can continue.

[00:13:11] Speaker 01:
You can reserve it if you like.

[00:13:13] Speaker 01:
You can answer Judge Stoll's question.

[00:13:17] Speaker 02:
Let me just finish the question.

[00:13:18] Speaker 02:
So we argue that there is a different legal standard for well-known routine and conventional.

[00:13:25] Speaker 02:
It's more than just prior art.

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And the time interval did not really, is obviously insufficient for that technology to have become well-known, routine, and conventional in the span of one year.

[00:13:40] Speaker 02:
It obviously does not happen that quick.

[00:13:53] Speaker 00:
Thank you, may it please the court.

[00:13:56] Speaker 00:
With regard to the abstract idea in this claim, the claim simply recites a method of providing transit time information upon request.

[00:14:06] Speaker 00:
Nothing more, nothing less.

[00:14:07] Speaker 00:
It's the same idea as me calling someone up and saying, how long is it going to take to send this shipment from Chicago to New York?

[00:14:16] Speaker 00:
That person looking up the answer in a

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a book and giving me the response.

[00:14:21] Speaker 00:
That's all the claim says.

[00:14:24] Speaker 03:
What if the abstract idea were defined, or not the abstract, excuse me, what if what the claim is directed to was to define a little bit more narrowly, not just to be the idea of looking up transit time, but also looking up transit time using different, a carrier database and a web services interface, different computer components or interfaces

[00:14:48] Speaker 03:
Does that change your view on whether it's directed to something that's abstract?

[00:14:53] Speaker 00:
No, because the computer here is merely the tool used to implement the abstract ideas.

[00:15:02] Speaker 00:
In my example, the tool to implement the abstract idea would be a telephone.

[00:15:07] Speaker 00:
They said, an appellant said, in the prior art, they used an HTTP server.

[00:15:13] Speaker 00:
Here, the claim just recites using a web services interface as the tool to accomplish the abstract idea.

[00:15:20] Speaker 03:
What about the argument that that web services interface was something that was pretty novel, and there were some difficulties that would come with inventing this particular claimed invention?

[00:15:32] Speaker 03:
How do you respond to that?

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In other words, you know, it was

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There was some technical ingenuity involved here in the implementation of the idea.

[00:15:41] Speaker 00:
I understand that argument, but I think that the specification contradicts that argument.

[00:15:47] Speaker 00:
Specifically, if you look at appendix page 106 of the specification, it says that the use of a web services interface according to the preferred embodiments makes the support requirements rather minimal.

[00:16:01] Speaker 00:
The shipper system merely needs to be able to make the appropriate web service calls.

[00:16:05] Speaker 00:
These may be any of the remote procedure calls already known to those in the ARC, or maybe some other type of call.

[00:16:12] Speaker 00:
So if this was such a novel and difficult system to implement, you would expect something other than that statement in the specification, that the support requirements are rather minimal and that

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Any procedure call known in the art would work here.

[00:16:28] Speaker 03:
In a way, you're saying the claim is more directed at the idea of automating the providing of transit time information?

[00:16:36] Speaker 00:
Correct.

[00:16:37] Speaker 00:
I think their allegation is that providing transit time information via a web services interface is quicker or more efficient than how it was provided in the past.

[00:16:47] Speaker 00:
And simply automating something or making something more efficient is not enough to get around 101.

[00:16:54] Speaker 03:
to the automating itself as part of the abstract idea?

[00:16:57] Speaker 03:
Is that what you're saying?

[00:16:58] Speaker 00:
No, I think that the abstract idea is just the idea of providing the transit time information upon request.

[00:17:05] Speaker 00:
I'm saying that in the step two analysis, the use of the web services interface is merely the use of conventional technology.

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And their goal here, and I think they state this in my brief, was the use of the web services technology would

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would improve the speed of providing this information.

[00:17:25] Speaker 00:
And that's not enough.

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Just saying getting an improved speed or efficiency of providing the information is not enough to get around 101.

[00:17:35] Speaker 00:
Because otherwise, any method of doing something over on a computer versus doing it with a paper and pencil would satisfy 101.

[00:17:45] Speaker 00:
If there's nothing further.

[00:17:51] Speaker 00:
Thank you.

[00:17:56] Speaker 01:
I'll call you back to you in three minutes.

[00:17:59] Speaker 02:
Thank you, Your Honor.

[00:18:02] Speaker 02:
With respect to the modification of the ERP system to interact with this system, it's not conventional to do that.

[00:18:11] Speaker 02:
It's not even known to do that.

[00:18:14] Speaker 02:
The web services interface is not conventional technology.

[00:18:18] Speaker 02:
We had to develop it, and it's attached as the appendix to the application.

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And it says that any computer system wants to interact with this interface, this is how you interact with it.

[00:18:32] Speaker 02:
So this is like, I've given you a keyhole.

[00:18:35] Speaker 02:
Any key you provided that fits the keyhole would work.

[00:18:39] Speaker 02:
We don't care anything else.

[00:18:41] Speaker 02:
This is how we define it.

[00:18:43] Speaker 02:
So it's not conventional in that sense.

[00:18:46] Speaker 02:
There's no web services interface that has ever existed for this application.

[00:18:52] Speaker 02:
Also, the claims do not recite, for example, simply a method for providing transit time information, which does not require human interaction.

[00:19:06] Speaker 02:
It doesn't say that.

[00:19:07] Speaker 02:
It's more specific than that.

[00:19:09] Speaker 02:
And so it's not an abstract idea because

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You can only infringe this claim by doing the very specific steps that are recited in the claims.

[00:19:19] Speaker 02:
There's no protection of any algorithm.

[00:19:22] Speaker 02:
There's no protection of any calculation of the transit time information.

[00:19:27] Speaker 02:
What is being protected by the claim is this specific way of obtaining these advantages.

[00:19:37] Speaker 02:
Finally, one point I also wanted to say on the reliance on conventional technology that pervades the arguments.

[00:19:50] Speaker 02:
That begs the question that's raised with Raising Berkheimer.

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What's the difference between being prior art and being well-known, routine, and conventional?

[00:20:00] Speaker 02:
They are not the same.

[00:20:01] Speaker 02:
It has to be something more than prior art.

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Now, when a technology gets introduced, in this case, web services, and it's in the process of being standardized, you'll notice that the appendix B that appears from the board is dated after our priority date.

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When it's that fresh, what you have here is a group of inventors who are utilizing those new technologies for a new application.

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And there is a single application that is here

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which is providing transit time information.

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That also falls under step two, where we're being very specific about how these technologies are being used.

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And nothing except these specific technologies, which we contend are non-conventional.

[00:20:51] Speaker 02:
We realize there's not a lot of jurisprudence on this particular standard.

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But we should make clear, and hopefully the court does in this case, that it's not merely conventional simply because it exists.

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And it's been standardized to try to encourage its adoption.