Fighter Jet Motion-Tracking Patent Invalid Under 35 USC § 101

The court granted defendant's motion for judgment on the pleadings that plaintiff's fighter jet motion-tracking patent was invalid for lack of patentable subject matter and found that the claims were directed toward an abstract idea. "The Court must decide whether a system of generic inertial sensors and a receiving element, combined with an instruction to solve a navigation equation, satisfies the first part of the Alice test. . . . Derived from Newtonian principles of motion and 'borrowing the mathematics that an inertial navigation system uses to track an airplane relative to a rotating earth,' the navigation equation is undoubtedly a complex mathematical concept, and a solution to the problem of tracking two moving objects in relation to each other. However, the Court finds that this concept is a 'building block of human ingenuity,' and the solution lies in the mathematical formulae, not the generic devices listed in the system claim."

Thales Visionix Inc. v. USA, 1-14-cv-00513 (COFC July 20, 2015, Order) (Wheeler, J.)