TCP/IP Wireless Transmission Patent Not Invalid Under Alice

The court denied defendant's motion for summary judgment that plaintiff's TCP/IP wireless transmission patent was invalid for lack of patentable subject matter because the claims contained an inventive concept. "[Defendant] alleges that the asserted claims of [a patent-in-suit] are invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101 because they claim the abstract idea of allocating wireless bandwidth based on packet contents. . . . [Plaintiff's] expert opined that the claimed improvement 'schedules the flow of information on the network according to the claimed method as opposed to how it would otherwise proceed.' . . . [T]he present invention 'specif[ies] how interactions with the [network] are manipulated to yield a desired result' by reallocating bandwidth based on the contents of packet headers. Even though claim 1 itself does not provide a detailed explanation of how packet headers are used to allocate the bandwidth, the inventive concept lies in the limitation of using packet headers to allocate bandwidth, not in the details of implementation."

Intellectual Ventures I LLC et al v. Motorola Mobility LLC, 1-11-cv-00908 (DED February 24, 2015, Order) (Robinson, J.)