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Eleven Inventor Groups Join Fight for Rehearing in Federal Circuit Court

Citizens Unite in Opposition:
The Case of Evolutionary Intelligence, LLC vs. Apple, Facebook, Sprint, Yelp, Twitter, et al.

The Constitution of the United States sets the standard: "The Congress shall have Power...To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries..." For more than two centuries, the Congress has exercised its power and duty to establish a fair system to evaluate whether discoveries are indeed new and who should be granted exclusive right to them. Over the past decade, those rights have been fatally eroded.

An American inventor, Michael De Angelo, followed the rules, pursuing his Constitutional rights. He conceived a complex set of ideas, refined them over many years, reduced them to an enabling specification, and applied for patent rights in 1998 using the leading intellectual property law firms in the country. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) rigorously examined these ideas and ultimately granted two patents, US 7010536 in 2006 and US 7702682 in 2010. The significance of the patents has been recognized by IBM, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Apple, Thales, and others.

When the inventor's company, Evolutionary Intelligence, found that its patented inventions were being routinely practiced with impunity by other corporations, including Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Sprint, Yelp, Groupon, and others, it asserted infringement. Defendants countered by attacking the patents with eight Inter Partes Review challenges (IPR's) before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), obtaining a stay on the case by assuring the judge that the outcome of that review would simplify the ongoing litigation or eliminate it all together.

Instead, after an initial claim construction was agreed upon by the parties, the patents withstood this barrage of IPR's without a single claim being altered in either patent, when the PTAB conducted its expert analysis of the claims structure and ruled against every challenge in its fine-grained analysis.

Then in 2016, the District Court of Northern California ruled the patents invalid in a few conclusory paragraphs.

It is clear to the impartial observer that the District Court in Northern California did not follow the law in invalidating the patents. The Court accepted vague and broad analogies untethered to the claims to rule the patents invalid as "resembling" "age-old forms of information processing." Rather than examining the claim structure of the patents, the Court, in clear violation of the law, joined Defendants in broad descriptions comparing the patents to "coffee baristas" and "human enterprises," giving precedence to these unfounded analogies over available expert opinion.

Even more troubling is the failure of the US Court of Appeals to examine the ruling of the District Court for error. The District Court allowed Defendants to argue through analogies untethered to the patent claims a broader claim construction than had been agreed upon by the Parties before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). It ignored the claim analysis conducted by the PTAB's expert judges. Instead, the Court compared the 45-page patent specification, with 31 diagrams and flowcharts and 700 enumerated operational references, to a child removing a dinosaur toy from a bin.

The case of Evolutionary Intelligence, LLC marks the first time the expert judges of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board have definitively validated patents while a local district court has invalidated them, using a specious methodology that could invalidate any patent.

It is also clear that Constitutional rights guaranteed inventors by the U.S. Constitution have been stripped away by a perfect storm of patent reform formulated by special interests, overcrowded court dockets, misapplied and misunderstood Supreme Court rulings, and common prejudice against independent inventors whose patents have been infringed and seek redress in the courts.

It is little understood that the rampant disregard of patents by large corporations has been engendered by a decade of laws and court practices that make patents unenforceable by the independent inventor. This undermines the very purpose of the patent system under the Constitution: to gather support for new inventions, including the raising of capital so critical to the launching of technology companies.

For these reasons, after studying this miscarriage of justice, eleven inventor organizations have joined in the fight for a fair re-hearing of a groundless ruling invalidating two solid patents: South Coast Inventors, Music City Inventors, Inventors’ Roundtable, Inventors Network of the Carolinas, Independent Inventors of America, National Innovation Association, Inventors Network of Minnesota, San Diego Inventors Forum, Edison Innovators Association, Tampa Bay Inventors Council, and Inventors Network of the Capital Area.

Attorney Robert Hart stated, "Inventor organizations from around the country joined this amicus brief to highlight the violation of inventors' due process rights which is occurring frequently as courts invalidate patents at the pleadings stages of litigation without a proper claim construction or a review of evidence rebutting allegations that the patent is just an abstract idea. Patents are presumed valid. If the patent has survived an Inter Partes Review, the finding of the Broadest Reasonable Interpretation ("BRI") of the claims must be considered when determining whether a patent is invalid. These inventor organizations recognize the need to educate the courts and Congress on the harm that this improper stripping of patentees' rights is causing."

In its re-hearing request, counsel for Evolutionary Intelligence has clearly laid out the errors of the Courts. A patent is a property right due adequate protection and due process under the US Constitution.

Stated Sir Alfred J. DiMora, Managing Director of Evolutionary Intelligence, "If the Federal Circuit does not grant a re-hearing, then there will be little reason for inventors to file any more patents until the Supreme Court and/or Congress address this failure of the American patent system. Disclosing an invention in a patent will become only an invitation to infringe.

Please visit:
1.  Evolutionary Intelligence Requests Amicus Support on Petition for Rehearing
2.  Request for Amicus Support at Federal Circuit
3.  Amici Join Fight for Evolutionary Intelligence