Judge Robinson has granted early summary judgment of invalidity on one patent in several of the Cyberfone patent infringement cases. See Cyberfone Systems, LLC v. Cellco Partnerhsip, et al., C.A. No. 11-827-SLR through 11-835-SLR (D. Del. Aug. 16, 2012). Judge Robinson first determined that under Bancorp Services, L.L.C. v. Sun Life Assurance Co. of Canada, 2012 WL 3037176 (Fed. Cir. July 27, 2012), the Court need not conduct claim construction prior to proceeding with a § 101 analysis. Rather, an early summary judgment even without the benefit of claim construction was appropriate. Cyberfone at 8-9. She then considered the patentability of the claimed invention and found that the patent-in-suit did not meet the “machine-or-transformation test” for patentability of a process claim under In re Bilski, 545 F.3d 943 (Fed. Cir. 2008). The claimed process neither “transformed” the credit card data collected nor was meaningfully limited in scope by the machine on which it operated. Judge Robinson found that “the use of a telephone to capture data does not make the abstract concepts of sorting and storing data somehow patent-eligible, [and to] the extent that a machine is also involved in the sorting or organizing step . . . [t]he machine is just a general purpose computing device being asked to do some unspecified sorting function.” Cyberfone at 11-15. Finally, Judge Robinson found that even aside from the non-dispositive machine-or-transformation test, the patent was too abstract: “[T]he abstract nature of plaintiff’s patent is plainly apparent. The patent, broken down into its component parts, recites steps by which data is obtained, sorted and stored. These steps represent nothing more than a disembodied concept of data sorting and storage and, therefore, the court finds the abstract nature of this patented process to be manifestly apparent.” Id. at 15-16.
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