divided panel finds claims as patent eligible

On Aug. 15, 2017, the Federal Circuit, in a 2-1 decision, reversed the lower court’s decision finding the claims of the asserted patent an improvement to computer memory systems and hence, patent-eligible under Alice framework.  Visual Memory, LLC v. Nvidia Corp., No. 2016, 2254 (Fed. Cir. Aug. 15, 2017).  Visual Memory sued Nvidia for infringement of the '740 patent and Nvidia filed a 12(b)(6) motion on the grounds that the claims were directed to patent-ineligible subject matter.  The district court granted the motion concluding that the claims were directed to the abstract idea of categorical data storage and found that the patent's programmable operational characteristics failed to provide the inventive concept.  On appeal, the Federal Circuit relied on the Enfish and Thales decisions as guideposts and concluded that the claims are directed to an "improved" computer memory system.  Writing for the majority, Judge Stoll reasoned that as with Enfish's self-referential table and the motion tracking system in Thales, the asserted claims were directed to a technological improvement.  In his dissent, Judge Wallach argued that the fundamental concept behind the asserted claims cannot be described at a lower level of abstraction than categorical data storage and therefore, failed Alice step one analysis.
The takeaways for practitioners from the court's decision are: (a) including details relating to specific technological improvements; (b) describing the advantages of the improvements over the prior art; and (c) including language in the claims that ties to the technological improvements described in the specification.
Full text of the opinion is available here.