The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Wednesday affirmed a district court ruling that dismissed a patent infringement suit brought by Piranha Media Distribution against Hulu. The court agreed with the lower court that Piranha's asserted claims, which relate to systems for integrating advertisements in digital media, were not patent eligible under Section 101.
Writing for the court, Judge Cunningham explained that claim 1 of the '403 patent is directed to the abstract idea of preventing skipping advertisements by receiving, organizing, displaying, and controlling access to data. The court cited its prior holding that claims reciting generalized steps of collecting, analyzing, and presenting information using conventional computer components are directed to abstract ideas. Piranha argued the claim offered a technical solution to the problem of users manipulating media to avoid ads, but the court noted that consumers have skipped ads for decades using tape recorders, VCRs, and other devices, and that Piranha's own statements to the district court contradicted its framing.
At step two of the Alice framework, the court found no inventive concept, saying the claimed intersplicer performs only insignificant data gathering steps. The CAFC declined to address whether a prior PTAB decision precluded Piranha from litigating eligibility, because the district court had not explicitly relied on that argument. The decision affirms Hulu's win and reinforces the difficulty of patenting ad-tech methods that rely on conventional computer operations.