Oral Argument of the Week: Zeroclick v. Apple

The oral argument of the week is from ZEROCLICK, LLC v. APPLE INC., No. 2017-1267 (Fed. Cir. June 1, 2018).  This oral argument was interesting in that the panel seemed a bit suspicious about Apple’s motives for asserting that the words “program” and “code” were nonce words.  While the claims were not written in Beauregard format, some questioning from the panel — namely, Judge Taranto — suggested that it was suspicious that Apple was seeking a holding that would convert Beauregard claims into means plus function claims.  Namely, if the court were to declare that “program” and “code” are nonce words, it would open up many Beauregard claims to 112¶6/112¶(f) attacks.  The panel sounded leery of making such a significant change to the law.

Beauregard claims take many forms these days; but, as one example, one might take the form such as that recited in INTERVAL LICENSING LLC v. AOL, INC., No. 2016-2502 (Fed. Cir. July 20, 2018):

18. A computer readable medium, for use by a content display system, encoded with one or more computer programs for enabling acquisition of a set of content data and display of an image or images generated from the set of content data on a display device during operation of an attention manager, comprising:

[1] acquisition instructions for enabling acquisition of a set of content data from a specified information source;

[2] user interface installation instructions for enabling provision of a user interface that allows a person to request the set of content data from the specified information source;

[3] content data scheduling instructions for providing temporal constraints on the display of the image or images generated from the set of content data;

[4] display instructions for enabling display of the image or images generated from the set of content data;

[5] content data update instructions for enabling acquisition of an updated set of content data from an information source that corresponds to a previously acquired set of content data;

[6] operating instructions for beginning, managing and terminating the display on the display device of an image generated from a set of content data;

[7] content display system scheduling instructions for scheduling the display of the image or images on the display device;

[8] installation instructions for installing the operating instructions and content display system scheduling instructions on the content display system; and

[9] audit instructions for monitoring usage of the content display system to selectively display an image or images generated from a set of content data.

 

Judge Taranto had these exchanges during the oral argument of ZEROCLICK, for example:

And, Judge Hughes had these comments, for example:

You can listen to the entire oral argument below:

 

In an apparent adjustment to distributed processing, some practitioners now begin their Beauregard claims by reciting: “One or more computer-readable storage media . . .” or the like.

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