Fed. Circ. Upholds Nixing of Abstract Photo-Sharing Patent
Troutman Sanders and Robert Angle were mentioned in a May 17 Law360 article and a May 18 Bloomberg BNA article about the Federal Circuit’s decision in TLI Communications v. AV Automotive affirming the U.S. District Court for Eastern District of Virginia’s invalidation of TLI’s patent under the Supreme Court’s decision in Alice v. CLS Bank.
Significantly, the Federal Circuit’s decision distinguished the court’s decision from the week before in Enfish v. Microsoft, which held that computer functionality improvements can save patents from otherwise being deemed abstract under Alice. In 2014, TLI alleged that Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Yahoo!, and several other social network companies, as well as Capital One, infringed its ’295 patent, which covers a method and system for taking, transmitting and organizing digital photographs over a computer network.
In addition to Capital One, Robert represented Twitter, Snapchat, Yahoo!, and several of the other social network companies.