LQ PatentCast: SAP America v. Investpic

Litigation Quality Patent PatentCast

In this installment of the Post-Alice Software Series, the Federal Circuit burns off some of the fog surrounding software claims at Step 2 of the Alice inquiry. The case of SAP vs. Investpic appears to directly answer, for the first time, whether a claim can lack the “inventive concept” needed to survive Alice, even though the claims are “groundbreaking, innovative, or even brilliant” as well as non-obvious. Now we know that an “inventive concept” cannot be found in the non-abstract realm, e.g., the claimed improvement can’t be an improvement to merely abstract “math.”