Consumer 2.0, Inc., dba Rently v. Tenant Turner, Inc.

In Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, 573 U.S. 208 (2014), this Court laid out the standards for analyzing patent eligibility under 35 U.S.C. § 101, and explained the main concern undergirding the analysis was one of preemption. This Court did not lay out the exact boundaries of the test, but rather had previously instructed the Federal Circuit may expand on the test so long as it was consistent with the statute. The Federal Circuit however routinely skips the preemption analysis, and has imported a quasi-section 103 analysis into Step Two of the test for determining whether the claims recite only “conventional” features or amount to “something more” than a claim on the abstract idea itself. The questions presented here are:

1. Whether preemption is a threshold and defining consideration that the lower courts must consider in determining whether a claimed invention is directed to patent eligible subject matter under Section 101, and

2. W hether the cour ts below have er red in conflating the Step Two conventionality analysis of Alice with the factual prior art patentability analysis of Section 103, without the evidentiary opportunities and protections against hindsight bias afforded by Section 103 and in conflict with this Court’s precedent in Graham v. John Deere Co. of Kansas City, 383 U.S. 1 (1966).