High Court Passes On USAA Bid to Save Check Deposit Patents (2)

The US Supreme Court Monday declined to hear USAA’s challenge to the prevailing legal test for determining if a patent is abstract, and therefore invalid.

The Federal Circuit applied the high court’s test from its 2014 decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Int’l to invalidate as abstract several USAA mobile check-scanning patents underpinning verdicts against PNC Bank NA worth $222.9 million collectively.

United Services Automobile Association argued that the lower courts had “no principled way of deciding what is, and is not, an abstract idea.” Without a workable definition of that term, the court wiped out “USAA’s claims for ...