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2016-2688 R&L Carriers Inc.

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vs. Micro... Micro Dia Inc.

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Mr. White.

[00:00:17] Speaker 01:
Good afternoon, Your Honor.

[00:00:18] Speaker 01:
Council, may it please the Court.

[00:00:20] Speaker 01:
The 078 patent teaches an unconventional process that ends in the creation of something previously unknown to the industry.

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an advanced loading manifest through the time-shifting limitations found.

[00:00:33] Speaker 02:
Your problem is we have all these cases, content extraction, about half a dozen of them that say that methods of organizing and retrieving data are abstract ideas.

[00:00:47] Speaker 02:
Here it's the same data that used to be handled manually and it's now using a computer and a scanner and wireless technology to

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transfer it in advance of the arrival of the truck.

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I mean, why isn't that an abstract idea?

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It's just using new technology to perform an old function.

[00:01:10] Speaker 01:
Well, first of all, Your Honor, I would disagree with your characterization of the patent.

[00:01:15] Speaker 01:
The patent is not merely a patent that's surrounding organization, transmission, collection of information.

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The patent goes much further than that.

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In fact, the patent... Well, you say the core is time shifting.

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That's correct, Your Honor.

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Okay, so that's your core.

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But does the time shifting do anything other than accelerate the process of making a load manifest?

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It does, Your Honor.

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Acceleration and time shifting, in my mind, are two different things.

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Acceleration is doing something that previously existed faster merely because you're doing it on a computer or some electronic equipment.

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that does something faster than what humans could do by themselves.

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The time-shifting component of this is not really an acceleration.

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What it is is a new... It's not an acceleration?

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It's a new process, Your Honor, that previously did not exist.

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Scanning the stuff, entering it into a computer, sending it wirelessly is not a new process.

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That technology existed before.

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It's just using that technology to produce an advanced load manifest, right?

[00:02:19] Speaker 01:
Your Honor, yes, Your Honor, using the technology in that way did previously exist, but the process to use that technology to create an advanced loading manifest did not exist until the 078 taught that process.

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The evidence before the trial court was uniform in that regard.

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There was that this process was not known to the industry, an advanced loading manifest, a loading manifest that is created before the truck arrives back at the terminal.

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did not exist was unknown to the industry until the 07 impact.

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Well, it didn't exist in this form.

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But the fact that you might have come up with a great idea doesn't necessarily make it patent eligible after the Supreme Court has now changed the scope of what that means.

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So your expert said that the invention, the gist of the invention, is getting the load manifest early, right?

[00:03:15] Speaker 01:
Correct, Your Honor.

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That's what you're calling time shifting as opposed to speeding it up?

[00:03:20] Speaker 01:
Time shifting is, again, if we talk about the patent in the terms used by the patent, the definition of the terms used, an advanced loading manifest is a loading manifest, a conventional loading manifest that is time shifted, meaning you now have it before the truck arrives at the terminal.

[00:03:38] Speaker 00:
If I took a picture of our vote sheet when we're done in the conference back there,

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and I sent it to my clerks so they could get to work right away before I went back to chambers and discussed it with them, would I be infringing?

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On the 07A patent?

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No, Your Honor.

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Am I time shifting?

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In some ways you are, in that if there is no process that existed in advance, for example, if you could pick up the phone and call your clerks and say, here's the result of the vote, that process previously existed before you took a picture of the vote sheet.

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That was true here, too, that you could fax it beforehand.

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Your Honor, I disagree.

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There is no evidence in this record to establish any process that allowed for the creation of an advanced loading manifesto.

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From the truck.

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But there were ways to fax it, correct?

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There were ways that you could stop at a truck stop and fax

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and fax bills of lading back to the terminal, but the evidence before the trial court was uniform in that regard too, because it only came from the appellant's expert, Lee Clare, who testified that that process was inherently inefficient and didn't achieve the results of this patent.

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Certainly there was no testimony, I believe, in this record that the truck stopped faxing.

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was being used by anyone as a process to create an advanced loading manifest, a loading manifest that was arriving at the terminal, that was being created at the terminal before the truck arrived for the load process.

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Nobody's ever said it's not new.

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The question is whether it's abstract.

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And the problem is that sort of data gathering, transmission, and using improved technology to do that has been held to be abstract and not patent eligible.

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You're correct, Your Honor, in that that limited action, organizing, collecting, transmitting information, has in fact been held to be abstract.

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But this is not what the patent does.

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When you create something unknown to the industry, an advanced loading manifest, as this record establishes, there is no evidence.

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There was no evidence before the trial court.

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There's no evidence before this court that any other process

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Previously existed to the 078 patented process that created an advanced loading manifest if the trucker stopped and called in and said This is what I got on my on my pallets and And the person in the office sat down and typed that out to prepare for when the load came in Is that an advanced loading?

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It is not, Your Honor, in that it is, Your Honor, in that it's created before the truck arrives back at the terminal.

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But that process was not used by the industry.

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The only evidence in the record is that no one used that process to create, because of the inherent inefficiencies that that process generated.

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So in reality, in this industry, this patent solves the problem, inherent in conventional load planning, by creating a document

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creating something, the advanced loading manifest, whether paper or electronic, in a way and at a time that allows the trucking company to actually use it to create economic benefits and solve problems.

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Wasn't that the whole point of what the Spoon Court was talking about?

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And Alice, it wasn't so much that this wasn't clever or new, that the mechanism they were using there wasn't something that had never been done before.

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The question was whether or not what they were doing is something that, even if it never happened,

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could have conceivably been done through more mundane means, like on pencil and paper or telephone calls or things that were conventional.

[00:07:24] Speaker 01:
Certainly that is one of the indicators of abstractness, Your Honor.

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Whether someone can do this in a more mundane... So does it matter if, in response to Judge Wallach's question, that nobody was picking up the phone and telling the person to create a load manifest while they were at a truck stop, does it matter that they didn't do it?

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Or does it matter that they could have done it?

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Well, I think that both.

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I think that the fact that no one was doing it probably means that no one could, in fact, do it in the context of this industry.

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Well, that would be because the technology was too primitive to do it on a routine basis.

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And later on, the technology made it possible.

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And what is existing here is something that flows routinely from the new technology, the ability.

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And what the cases say is that the concept of using new technology to do old things faster is not patent eligible.

[00:08:20] Speaker 01:
Your Honor, I disagree that this is a process.

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The 078 patent teaches a process that is simply using new technology to do an existing process faster.

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There is no evidence that this was an existing process.

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There's no evidence that... Well, I'm not sure there is.

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You say that people came, the truckers came with a fistful of paper, gave it to the clerk.

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And the clerk preferred the loading manifest, and they had to wait for it.

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So the new technology enabled them to prefer the loading manifest at a much earlier time.

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Your Honor, I disagree with your assertion that the technology allowed for the fistful of paper process to go faster.

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The technology in the only the process allows for that to happen.

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The technology, a scanner, the image processor, those technologies without the process

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do not allow for the creation of an advanced loading manifest.

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Only the process allows for that.

[00:09:14] Speaker 00:
How does this differ conceptually from long-term, long-time engineering planning programs like PERT or World War II combat loading programs where they put in into the ship, they make sure they put into the ship the first last, the first thing out that they need when they hit the beach.

[00:09:38] Speaker 00:
Conceptually, it seems the same.

[00:09:40] Speaker 01:
Your Honor, I'm not familiar with the specific items that you raised.

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I can tell you this, though.

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It sounds to me from your description like those are processes that are merely sped up through the automation, but the inherent speed of a computer or the inherent speed of the equipment that is being used to make the process.

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Those are all done manually.

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Correct.

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With people sitting around thinking about them.

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Right.

[00:10:03] Speaker 01:
They were manually done and then you put a computer on them and now you can do them faster because the computer thinks faster than human beings.

[00:10:09] Speaker 01:
That is not the process of this patent.

[00:10:12] Speaker 01:
This patent does not automate a previously existing process.

[00:10:16] Speaker 01:
This creates a new process not known to the industry that creates a new result and advanced loading manifest that was never done.

[00:10:22] Speaker 01:
It's not a new process.

[00:10:22] Speaker 02:
It's the same process of producing a loading manifest.

[00:10:25] Speaker 02:
It's just doing it earlier.

[00:10:27] Speaker 01:
Your honor, I disagree, your honor.

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There was no process previous to the 078 patent that taught transmitting the images of the shipping documentation data to the terminal to create a loading manifest before the truck arrived at the terminal.

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That's the process.

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That didn't exist.

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And it didn't exist until it was taught by this patent.

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The advanced loading manifest, as defined by the patent as being a loading manifest generated before the truck arrives at the terminal, did not exist until this patent taught how to do it.

[00:11:02] Speaker 01:
The technology that's generic, admittedly, the technology that is used in this process to create that new thing cannot do it by itself.

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And what I was saying to you is, conceptually, on June 6, 1944,

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When ship A goes ashore and artillery rolls out, ship B lands next to it, and the artillery shells are on top instead of on the bottom.

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And everybody's planned that it'll work that way, so they'll all marry up together at the same time.

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And conceptually, that seems to me to be analogous.

[00:11:41] Speaker 01:
Your Honor, as a World War II buff, I recognize June 6, 1944 as D-Day.

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And I disagree with Your Honor's assertion because I believe what you described is more the automation of a pre-existing process using technology to make it go faster.

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We're doing the same thing, we're just doing it faster.

[00:11:58] Speaker 00:
No, they invented it for purposes of invasions.

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Okay, and that's a fact I was not aware of, Your Honor, so I can't speak to that particular point.

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All I can say is that for this process and this patent, I asked the court to search the record, to look for anything in this record

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that allowed the trial court to conclude that this is a fundamental, long-standing practice in the industry.

[00:12:23] Speaker 02:
It doesn't have to be fundamental and long-standing to be abstract, does it?

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That is not the touchstone test.

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This court has announced many times that there is no touchstone test as to whether something is abstract.

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You are correct, Your Honor.

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However, that is an indicator frequently used by this court and the Supreme Court to determine whether a patent is directed to an abstract idea.

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And among several others, all of the indicators, as we outlined in our brief, show that this patent is not directed to an abstract idea because none of those indicators are present with respect to this particular patent.

[00:12:58] Speaker 01:
Just like when we look at the idea of how do we determine whether a patent is directed to an abstract idea.

[00:13:05] Speaker 01:
Certainly, it is a difficult construct.

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This court is recognized and the Supreme Court is recognized.

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It's hard to figure this out sometimes.

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And so what this court has done is rely upon these indicators to tell us, OK, this is what patents that are directed to an abstract idea tend to look like.

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So when we find an indicator, like conventional long-standing practice, that is not blinking red, that's an indication that this patent is not directed to an abstract idea.

[00:13:35] Speaker 01:
When we have a patent that claims these specificities.

[00:13:38] Speaker 02:
It sounds as though any kind of time shifting, in your view, involving scanners and computers

[00:13:44] Speaker 02:
would be patentable.

[00:13:46] Speaker 02:
I mean if a police officer at the scene of an accident sends in the information to the station using wireless transmission, all of a sudden that's different because he used to hand it over

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in paper form, and now he sends it in advance before he arrives back at the station.

[00:14:08] Speaker 02:
That would be a patentable idea.

[00:14:09] Speaker 02:
What's the difference?

[00:14:10] Speaker 01:
Your Honor, I can't speak to the other processes in other industries or other practices.

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But we tried to ask hypothetical questions to define what the scope of what you're asking us to do is.

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And in my hypothetical, where the officers

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gathering information about an accident and sending it in wirelessly to the police station.

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There's time shifting.

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They don't have to wait for him to get back and fill out the paperwork.

[00:14:37] Speaker 02:
So that would be a patentable idea also, right?

[00:14:41] Speaker 01:
Your Honor, I would have to know.

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I can't answer that question because I would have to know what process has previously existed with respect to that practice.

[00:14:47] Speaker 02:
Well, I know what the process previously existed.

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filled out a form and when he got back to the station he gave them the form describing the facts of the accident.

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And now instead he sends that information wirelessly to his superiors before he arrives back at the station.

[00:15:04] Speaker 01:
If the process previously existed, in other words that's how they did it and we're just using technology to speed up the process, it is less analogous.

[00:15:11] Speaker 02:
How is that different from yours?

[00:15:13] Speaker 01:
Because the process didn't exist, your honor.

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Prior to the 078 patent... The process didn't exist in my example either.

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There was no way

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for the officer to get his accident report to the station before he arrived back at the station?

[00:15:24] Speaker 01:
Your Honor, the phone call back to the station got the information back to the station.

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In that situation, the process did exist in your hypothetical.

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So it's true here that the trucker could phone in the information?

[00:15:37] Speaker 01:
That process didn't exist, Your Honor.

[00:15:39] Speaker 01:
That never happened.

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It never occurred.

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There's no evidence in this record to establish, no evidence in this record on summary judgment.

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and where all inferences must be drawn in favor of us.

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There's no evidence in this record that that process ever once took place in the context of creating a loading manifest for load planning purposes.

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So whether something is an abstract idea is boiled down to whether we can possibly think that something might have happened in the past and therefore this process is just an automation

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of something that possibly happened before in this industry, it's not going to be very easy to get patents to be not drawn to an abstract idea.

[00:16:25] Speaker 01:
We have to have evidence.

[00:16:26] Speaker 02:
Okay, I think we're out of time.

[00:16:27] Speaker 02:
We'll give you two minutes for a bottle.

[00:16:29] Speaker 02:
Thank you, Your Honor.

[00:16:32] Speaker 00:
Did you have another question?

[00:16:34] Speaker 00:
No, I'll ask another question.

[00:16:37] Speaker 02:
Okay, Mr. Franklin.

[00:16:40] Speaker 00:
When you start, it seems to me I saw stuff in the record that did indicate that

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truckers were previously calling in or whatever.

[00:16:50] Speaker 04:
Their expert testified, Your Honor, that other ways that you could get the information would be to fax from a truck stop or call it in.

[00:16:57] Speaker 04:
And the expert said, well, those were inefficient, but those were other ways.

[00:17:01] Speaker 03:
But he didn't say they were happening.

[00:17:03] Speaker 03:
He didn't quite say they were happening, Your Honor.

[00:17:05] Speaker 03:
He said conceivably he could come up with some other ways that could be done.

[00:17:09] Speaker 03:
Yeah.

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I mean, I think you could read it both ways, but I'll give that to you, Your Honor.

[00:17:13] Speaker 03:
But I think your friend on the other side is saying that

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it's important that it never did happen, or that there's no evidence that it ever happened.

[00:17:19] Speaker 04:
Right.

[00:17:19] Speaker 04:
I think he's confusing concepts of novelty and non-obviousness with Section 101.

[00:17:23] Speaker 03:
But to the extent that we would ever find it to be a meaningful distinction, there really isn't evidence in the record that it ever did happen before.

[00:17:32] Speaker 04:
We haven't gotten, and we hope to never get to the point where we would present our non-obviousness arguments, but that's not the issue today.

[00:17:43] Speaker 04:
I think it's quite clear that the district court correctly applied the Alice test to hold these... What do you think the abstract idea is?

[00:17:51] Speaker 03:
Because I am a little troubled by the district court having four or five different iterations of it.

[00:17:57] Speaker 04:
Fair enough, Your Honor.

[00:17:58] Speaker 04:
And of course, that has happened, as we said in our brief, that has happened in this court's opinions occasionally in some other cases.

[00:18:04] Speaker 03:
We don't make mistakes.

[00:18:05] Speaker 04:
Never, no.

[00:18:06] Speaker 04:
And we're not saying it's a mistake.

[00:18:07] Speaker 04:
And I would say at footnote one of the reply brief, they're not saying it's a mistake either.

[00:18:11] Speaker 04:
And of course, the court's review is de novo.

[00:18:14] Speaker 04:
And we would characterize the abstract idea as transmitting shipping information to accelerate load planning.

[00:18:21] Speaker 04:
That is one of the formulations the district court used.

[00:18:24] Speaker 04:
Essentially, the district court said getting the information to the load planners faster.

[00:18:28] Speaker 04:
That's another way of saying the same thing.

[00:18:31] Speaker 04:
In any event, this is an abstract idea.

[00:18:35] Speaker 04:
Synopsis makes clear that a new abstract idea is still an abstract idea.

[00:18:40] Speaker 03:
So getting information, say it again, getting information to load planners faster?

[00:18:45] Speaker 04:
That was the district court's formulation.

[00:18:47] Speaker 03:
Well, that's one of her formulations.

[00:18:48] Speaker 04:
One of her formulations.

[00:18:49] Speaker 04:
I think that was the one she used twice, citing to the expert testimony in this case, which I think Your Honor also.

[00:18:56] Speaker 04:
So what do you think the abstract idea is?

[00:18:58] Speaker 04:
We would characterize it as transmitting shipping information to accelerate load planning for trucks, which is, I think, essentially the same thing that the district court has said in just different languages.

[00:19:09] Speaker 04:
I would just, a few points, I don't think I want to rehash everything that went forward in the argument before, but just a few points.

[00:19:16] Speaker 04:
I would point out the specification itself at page 113 of the Joint Appendix says, quote, the present invention automates the process of receiving transportation documentation and producing advanced loading manifests.

[00:19:30] Speaker 04:
This is an automation of a previously existing process.

[00:19:33] Speaker 04:
I think this case is actually a bit easier than some others that the court has faced post

[00:19:39] Speaker 04:
because the patent affects no change to the content or format of the information or how it is used.

[00:19:47] Speaker 04:
It merely uses conventional scanning and wireless transmission technology to send the load planners the exact same information that they previously got, the bill of lading information, to produce the exact same loading manifest that they previously produced in the exact same manner.

[00:20:05] Speaker 04:
And here I would disagree with counsel for the appellant that the advanced loading manifest is anything different.

[00:20:12] Speaker 04:
The patent doesn't describe it as anything different.

[00:20:15] Speaker 04:
It can use any form of loading manifest preparation technology.

[00:20:19] Speaker 04:
This court, in the Qualcomm opinion, said you can even do it on pen and paper.

[00:20:24] Speaker 04:
That was a holding of the court.

[00:20:26] Speaker 04:
And I would add also, in case it's relevant, that their expert at page 3508

[00:20:33] Speaker 04:
Page 85 of the transcript at line 9 said, quote, agreed with the statement, quote, that any loading manifest is really an advanced loading manifest because you create it before you load the truck.

[00:20:47] Speaker 04:
There's nothing revolutionary here.

[00:20:49] Speaker 04:
Time shifting is acceleration.

[00:20:52] Speaker 04:
It is not different than that.

[00:20:54] Speaker 03:
It is simply the fact that... If you think this is so much easier than a lot of other cases we've faced and that it was clear that it's not patent eligible,

[00:21:03] Speaker 03:
Why did it take all of these years of litigation?

[00:21:07] Speaker 03:
I mean, you can imagine the frustration of the patent holder to say, wait, years into this, after MDL and everything else, we're going to say that there was no there there?

[00:21:20] Speaker 04:
Well, Your Honor, it has been a tortured road.

[00:21:22] Speaker 04:
But I think the reason is because we thought we had a really good argument on a motion to dismiss, and we were, as it turns out, only half right.

[00:21:31] Speaker 04:
as Your Honor may recall.

[00:21:34] Speaker 04:
That took a while.

[00:21:35] Speaker 04:
The case was obviously not going forward during that period.

[00:21:39] Speaker 04:
It went up and down.

[00:21:40] Speaker 04:
Then there were proceedings initiated in the Patent Office, which then stayed the litigation further.

[00:21:47] Speaker 02:
The district court, following those proceedings... I mean, it was a result of the Supreme Court's decision in Alice, right?

[00:21:52] Speaker 04:
It was that too, Your Honor, and so we

[00:21:56] Speaker 04:
What happened was the district court asked for briefing on what then became the Qualcomm appeal, which then stopped everything while that case went up and down.

[00:22:05] Speaker 04:
We elected to raise this issue at our earliest opportunity, frankly, on a motion for summary judgment rather than motion.

[00:22:12] Speaker 03:
So that's why it happened.

[00:22:13] Speaker 03:
Where does the patent office proceeding stand?

[00:22:15] Speaker 03:
The briefing said that it was on appeal.

[00:22:18] Speaker 04:
Well, the patent office proceeding that we referred to in the brief refers to related patents that share the same.

[00:22:26] Speaker 04:
The application, yes, we sent, I don't know if your honors saw it and I apologize if you didn't, we sent a supplemental letter on Monday, which is immediately after I learned of the information, noting that the Board of Patent Appeals had affirmed the rejection of the 990 application.

[00:22:44] Speaker 04:
And I apologize, we sent that and I did notice that the oral argument was scheduled for today.

[00:22:51] Speaker 04:
I only learned about that fact on Monday, and I was made sure to try to submit that to the court.

[00:22:56] Speaker 04:
But that has been affirmed by the Board of Patent Appeals, and it was affirmed on essentially the same grounds that we're arguing here, that there was an abstract idea that was implemented using conventional technology.

[00:23:10] Speaker 04:
Merely using current conventional technology to speed up an existing process is not a

[00:23:17] Speaker 04:
an inventive concept that can transform this into a patentable subject matter.

[00:23:23] Speaker 04:
And I was interested, Your Honor, Judge Wallach referred to the hypothetical of sending your clerks something.

[00:23:30] Speaker 04:
And I actually thought about it the other way, but from my side of the bench, which is back, and I'm a little old enough to remember this, back when we hand-delivered briefs to the court.

[00:23:40] Speaker 04:
Then fax machines came around, and sometimes the clerks say, hey, can you fax that stuff because we want to get it sooner?

[00:23:45] Speaker 04:
And we did that.

[00:23:47] Speaker 04:
Then, of course, email came around.

[00:23:48] Speaker 04:
And then we send them in by email.

[00:23:50] Speaker 04:
But ultimately, those are good ideas.

[00:23:52] Speaker 04:
But none of them makes a patent if you're the first person to come up.

[00:23:56] Speaker 00:
So the other side of that coin is I sat around trying to think of a way this could become patentable.

[00:24:04] Speaker 00:
And how far would you have to go with, well, OK, here's the design of how the truck gets loaded and so on.

[00:24:12] Speaker 00:
But I couldn't think of anything that

[00:24:14] Speaker 00:
wasn't done in the industry already by somebody sitting there saying, no, put this in the truck here, because it's going to come out last, and so on, which brought up the analogy of the combat loading.

[00:24:27] Speaker 04:
And the reason your honor can't is because the patent doesn't claim any improvements to loading manifest creation technology.

[00:24:34] Speaker 04:
You do it however you want to do it.

[00:24:35] Speaker 04:
You do it the same way you did it before.

[00:24:37] Speaker 04:
It's the same information.

[00:24:39] Speaker 04:
You used to drive it there, essentially, because it was on the truck.

[00:24:42] Speaker 04:
Now the technology comes around where you can put a fax machine.

[00:24:45] Speaker 04:
It's not a scanner and a transmitter in the cab, and you do it that way.

[00:24:49] Speaker 04:
Good idea, maybe?

[00:24:51] Speaker 04:
Good idea.

[00:24:51] Speaker 03:
Yeah, definitely.

[00:24:51] Speaker 03:
Clearly, everybody thinks it's a good idea, because everybody's doing it.

[00:24:54] Speaker 04:
Good idea.

[00:24:55] Speaker 04:
That's why there's so many defendants.

[00:24:58] Speaker 04:
Fewer and fewer each time we come here, Your Honor.

[00:25:02] Speaker 04:
Good idea, but not a patent, Your Honor.

[00:25:05] Speaker 04:
And if the court has no further questions?

[00:25:09] Speaker 02:
No.

[00:25:09] Speaker 02:
Thank you.

[00:25:09] Speaker 02:
Thank you, Mr. Friend.

[00:25:11] Speaker 02:
Mr. White, you have a couple minutes.

[00:25:14] Speaker 01:
Yes, your honor.

[00:25:14] Speaker 01:
In the brief moments, I want to focus on the other indicators of abstraction that we perhaps have not discussed that's found in this court's precedent.

[00:25:24] Speaker 02:
I want to come back to my example with the police officer in the court.

[00:25:27] Speaker 02:
Let's suppose the police department says that this has to be a four-page form, and it has all sorts of information in it, and that because it was a four-page form with a lot of information in it, the record shows that this was never

[00:25:41] Speaker 02:
done by telephone earlier or by any other means.

[00:25:45] Speaker 02:
It only became possible to send it back to the station once you had this new technology of computers and wireless communication.

[00:25:55] Speaker 02:
Then the idea becomes, in your view, patent eligible, right?

[00:26:00] Speaker 01:
It does, Your Honor, because in that situation there is no evidence.

[00:26:03] Speaker 01:
Again, we have to fall back to something to define an abstract idea.

[00:26:10] Speaker 01:
This court has said over and over again, if we try hard enough, we will find an abstract idea in every single patent.

[00:26:19] Speaker 02:
So we have to have... The opposite side of that coin is that you'll find a patent in every abstract idea.

[00:26:27] Speaker 01:
I recognize that, but I'm the appellant here, Your Honor.

[00:26:31] Speaker 01:
So thank you.

[00:26:35] Speaker 01:
So there have to be indicators.

[00:26:39] Speaker 01:
For us to have some objective test of whether or not we're falling into the trap of just finding what we're creating, what we're trying to find, we have to have indicators that set up an objective test.

[00:26:55] Speaker 01:
One of those is long-standing conventional practice.

[00:26:59] Speaker 01:
I would respectfully suggest it's not sufficient for us to posit potential

[00:27:06] Speaker 01:
long-standing potential processes.

[00:27:09] Speaker 02:
Part of this was long-standing and conventional.

[00:27:11] Speaker 02:
That is, the preparation of a load manifest.

[00:27:14] Speaker 01:
Correct.

[00:27:14] Speaker 01:
That is correct, Your Honor.

[00:27:15] Speaker 01:
But the process of creating a loading manifest, conventional processes, is not this process.

[00:27:23] Speaker 01:
This process creates a loading manifest at a time that the conventional processes could not create.

[00:27:28] Speaker 01:
The other indicators of abstractness this court relies upon

[00:27:33] Speaker 01:
It's not functional.

[00:27:34] Speaker 01:
It's not drawn to a broad method.

[00:27:36] Speaker 01:
It's drawn to a specific result.

[00:27:39] Speaker 01:
The fact that it creates a tangible output.

[00:27:42] Speaker 01:
Those are all indicators that this court uses to identify an abstract idea.

[00:27:47] Speaker 01:
My parting point is I would urge this court to recognize the converse of those indicators.

[00:27:53] Speaker 01:
And that is that if those indicators tell us that this patent is likely drawn to the abstract idea, the lack of evidence

[00:28:02] Speaker 01:
of those indicators also tells us that they're not, it's not drawn to an abstract idea.

[00:28:09] Speaker 02:
I think we're out of time with that.

[00:28:12] Speaker 02:
Thank you Mr. White.