Facebook, Windy City Face Lively Panel on Eligibility Appeal

Counsel for patent owner Windy City Innovations LLC and alleged infringer Facebook Inc. faced heated questioning by a three-judge panel of the Federal Circuit over whether an internet chat invention was patent-eligible.

Windy City appealed a decision from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California invalidating its U.S. Patent No. 8,458,245 on real-time communications between computers as an abstract idea ineligible for patenting under Section 101 of the Patent Act.

“At every turn, the district court discredited the specification’s teachings in a way that created an impossibly high bar for any patent to survive Alice scrutiny,” Windy ...