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Contour v. GoPro: What Passes Alice Step One

Federal Circuit, decided 9 September 2024. Read from the decision; quotations verified against its text.

Read this with Recentive v. Fox. Contour shows what survived. Recentive shows what did not. Reading this one alone makes eligibility look easier than it is.
Holding

On September 9, 2024 the Federal Circuit reversed a summary judgment of ineligibility and held that claims to a point-of-view camera recording high and low quality video streams in parallel, then wirelessly sending only the low quality stream for real time viewing, are directed to a specific technological means rather than an abstract result, and so are eligible at Alice step one without needing step two.

GoPro won summary judgment that Contour's camera patents claimed an abstract idea. The Federal Circuit reversed.

The difference was that Contour's claim recited a particular mechanism: record two video streams in parallel at different quality levels, then send only the low quality one over the wireless link so the user can watch and adjust in real time without running out of bandwidth.

The court held that the district court's description of the claim, as "creating and transmitting video (at two different resolutions) and adjusting the video's settings remotely", pitched it at an impermissibly high level of generality, "untethered from the language of the claims".

A narrowing claim construction Contour had accepted years earlier, during an unrelated patent office challenge, turned out to be what saved it.

What This Case Is Not

This is not a recipe. The temptation is to read the holding as "recite a specific mechanism and you pass." The opinion does not support that. The win also depended on a narrowing claim construction accepted years earlier and on an argument the defendant did not make. This is evidence of what one court found sufficient on one record, not a drafting rule that produces a result.
  • It does not establish a threshold of specificity that claims must meet.
  • It does not mean a narrowing construction is always protective. Here it happened to align with the claim language the court read.
  • It does not tell you whether your claims are eligible. That is a legal determination on your actual claims.

Educational, not legal advice. Whether any particular claim is eligible under § 101 is a legal conclusion a qualified patent attorney reaches on the actual claims.

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