Cellspin Soft, Inc. v. Fitbit LLC

Background

The opinion concerns several related cases brought by Cellspin Soft, Inc. against Fitbit, Inc., Moov, Inc., Nike, Inc., Under Armour, Inc., Fossil Group, Inc., Garmin International, Inc., Nikon Americas, Inc., and other defendants identified in the caption. The defendants filed motions for summary judgment challenging the validity of Cellspin’s asserted patents under 35 U.S.C. § 101. Summary judgment is a procedure for deciding a claim without a trial when the relevant facts are not genuinely disputed.

Cellspin opposed the motions by identifying 55 alleged inventive concepts in 21 asserted claims. The court found that those concepts were not sufficiently tied to the language of the claims. It explained that a § 101 analysis must be based on the claims, not on concepts considered separately from the claim limitations. The court also noted that it had previously treated claim 1 of the ’794 Patent as representative of all asserted claims, but that approach was no longer appropriate because, among other things, the parties identified use of HTTP as an alleged inventive concept even though claim 1 did not mention HTTP.

Court’s Order

The court ordered the parties to submit a concise chart linking each alleged inventive concept to the relevant asserted claims and to the relevant limitation or combination of limitations. The parties also had to identify representative claims for the court to evaluate. The court stated that a claim is representative when the patentee makes no meaningful argument that a limitation absent from that claim has distinctive significance, or when the parties agree to treat the claim as representative. The parties were directed to try to agree on representative claims; if they could not, Cellspin had to identify a meaningful argument, with a citation to its opposition brief, explaining why a limitation was significant to the § 101 analysis. The chart and any statement about representative claims were due December 22, 2020. The court warned that omitting an alleged inventive concept from the chart would waive arguments concerning that concept.

The court vacated the December 15, 2020 hearing on the defendants’ summary-judgment motion, Cellspin’s motion to strike, and Garmin’s motion to amend its invalidity contentions. It stated that the hearing would be reset later. The order did not grant or deny the summary-judgment motions and did not decide the patents’ validity. Judge Yvonne Rogers signed the order.