Implicit, LLC v. The Home Depot U.S.A., Inc., and Home Depot Product Authority, LLC, Civil Action No. 1:22-CV-02476-VMC (N.D. Ga. June 6, 2023).

Judge Calvert recently tackled another substantive patent issue in the Northern District of Georgia. In this patent infringement action, Plaintiff Implicit, LLC alleged Home Depot infringed at least Claim 1 of U.S. Patent No. 8,856,185 (the “’185 Patent”), entitled Method and System for Attribute Management in a Namespace. See Opinion and Order, at 1, 8. Defendant Home Depot sought an order determining that the ’185 Patent, or at least Claim 1 of the ’185 Patent, was directed to ineligible subject-matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101.

Implicit defended its ’185 Patent, stating that it was created “in the area of computer systems and methods to manage access to information using object attributes which resulted in the development of a novel method and system for attribute management in a namespace in 2002.” See id. at 3. Specifically, Implict asserted the ’185 Patent was designed to solve two perceived drawbacks from the prior art: (i) objects in these computer systems and data structures contained pre-defined attributes that developers could not change; and (ii) namespaces generally provide a logical view of their objects that only corresponds to the physical organization of the namespace (such as hierarchical organization). See id. at 11. But Judge Calvert disagreed with Implicit’s arguments.

Going through the two-step invalidity analysis under Alice, the Court found that Claim 1 of the ’185 Patent was directed to an abstract idea that lacked an inventive concept sufficient to transform the claimed abstract idea into a patent-eligible application. See id. at 14, 16. Specifically, the Court highlighted that the ’185 Patent’s claimed concept is analogous to the abstract idea of an index used to search and retrieve data, which is unpatentable. See id. at 11-12 (citing Intellectual Ventures I LLC v. Erie Indemnity Company, 850 F.3d 1315, 1327 (Fed. Cir. 2017) (“This type of activity, i.e., organizing and accessing records through the creation of an index-searchable database, includes longstanding conduct that existed well before the advent of computers and the Internet.”)).

To finish its Alice analysis, the Court determined that the ’185 Patent did not contain an inventive concept sufficient to transform the claimed abstract idea. See id. at 16. Implicit attempted to rebut this point by re-asserting the feature of dynamically defining various object attributes, but the Court dismissed this argument because “[that] concept . . . [did] not clearly appear in Claim 1 but instead only in the specifications.” See id. It reasoned that “Implicit points to nothing particular about namespaces that makes storing object attributes inventive, as it concedes that prior art already used namespaces to store attributes.” Id. “In short, the [’185] Patent identifies a need, but the claims fail to provide a concrete solution to address that need.” Id. Concluding the matter, Judge Calvert granted Home Depot’s motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim and ruled that Claim 1 of the ’185 Patent was invalid. The matter was dismissed without prejudice on June 6, 2023, and Implicit filed a notice of appeal with the United States Court of Appeals Federal Circuit on June 21, 2023.