Judge Wu ruled on the Facebook and Snap motions together in August 2018, granting Snap’s challenge as to the ‘713 patent as directed to the abstract idea of “displaying a timestamp based on the rule of whether a predetermined duration of time has passed” without the addition of a sufficient inventive concept. That same day, Snap filed its own 12(b)(6) motion, asserting similar arguments as to the ‘351, ‘929, and ‘634 patents and further arguing that the 8,301,713 patent is impermissibly directed to the abstract ideas of “time stamping” and the 8,326,327 and 8,825,084 patents, to “locating and mapping activity”.
In June 2018, Facebook filed a Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss under Alice as to four of the asserted patents, arguing that the 8,296,351 and 8,676,929 patents are both unpatentably directed to the abstract idea of “sending advertisements to users based on triggering events” the 8,209,634 patent, to “displaying information regarding unread messages” and the 9,349,120 patent, to “silencing message notifications”.
The cases against Facebook and Snap were consolidated in September 2018. Facebook is further accused of infringement through its products’ support of encrypted messaging, game-related messaging, and photo tagging, while Twitter’s support of retweets, message read receipts, and tweet filtering are also at issue in that case. All three defendants have been accused of infringement through their respective services’ and apps’ support of notification alert badges and advertising, with Facebook and Twitter also alleged to infringe through their products’ support of silencing notifications for selected messaging threads and Facebook and Snap targeted over their support of time-stamped messages and location sharing. Asserted in those complaints are multiple, overlapping sets of patents from the 48 presently at issue in the campaign. In addition, the order incorporated Judge Wu’s analysis from another sealed decision issued that same day in cases against Facebook and Snap in which the court invalidated a further two patents but left a third intact.īlackBerry launched the underlying litigation campaign in July 2016, adding cases against Facebook (and subsidiaries Instagram and Whatsapp) in March 2018 ( 2:18-cv-01844), Snap that April ( 2:18-cv-02693), and Twitter in February 2019 ( 2:19-cv-01444).
The court also declined to invalidate two other patents, one due to a factual dispute under Aatrix and the other due to its similarity to certain other patents previously upheld by the Federal Circuit. Wu held that two patents generally related to notification management are unpatentably directed to abstract ideas but granted the plaintiff leave to amend its complaint in order to add additional factual allegations regarding those patents. In an October 1 order issued in the company’s lawsuit against Twitter, District Judge George H. A California judge has ruled that claims from four messaging and social media patents asserted by BlackBerry are invalid under Alice.