Federal Circuit Focuses on POV Camera Technology in Latest Patent Eligibility Opinion

In Contour IP Holding LLC v. GoPro, Inc., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed a summary judgment in which the asserted patents were directed to an abstract idea and, thus, patent-ineligible.

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California found that claims were directed to the abstract idea of "creating and transmitting video (at two different resolutions) and adjusting the video's settings remotely" and that the claim recites only functional, results-oriented language with "no indication that the physical components are behaving in any way other than their basic, generic tasks."

The Federal Circuit held that the district court characterized the claims at "an impermissibly high level of generality" and, in doing so, disregarded "the disclosed technological means for obtaining a technological result," which ensured a conclusion of an abstract idea. The Federal Circuit instead looked to whether the claims recited a specific means that improved technology, rather than reciting a result or effect that is the abstract idea.

To assess this question, the Federal Circuit looked to the claim construction to determine that the claims recite a specific technological means to achieve the desired improvement in a point of view (POV) camera – "parallel data stream recording with the low-quality recording wirelessly transferred to a remote device." That is, the court found that the claims enable a POV camera to operate differently than it otherwise could. The court rejected GoPro's argument that the claims merely recite known components, holding the reciting known components, alone, does not "necessarily mean the claim is directed to an abstract idea."

The court rejected the comparison to the Yu v. Apple decision. In Yu, the Federal Circuit said it characterized the claims as "being directed to the abstract idea of taking two pictures (which may be different at different exposures) and using one picture to enhance the other in some way" – and there was "no dispute" that the practice of using multiple pictures to enhance each other has been known by photographers "for over a century." Here, however, there is no argument that a "camera's recording two video streams in parallel and wireless transferring the lower quality video stream to a remote device for real time viewing and adjustment was a long-known or fundamental practice supporting patent ineligibility at Alice step one."

The court additionally looked at the patents' specifications and found that they disclose "improving POV camera technology through specific means of generating high- and low-quality video streams in parallel … and the claims reflect this improvement."

In short, the court found that the patents disclosed improving a POV camera in a specific way and that the claims reflected that specific way of achieving the technological improvement in the operation of POV cameras. Because the court decided that the claims were not directed to an ineligible concept, it did not proceed to the second step of the Alice inquiry.