Gree, Inc. v. Supercell Oy

NOTE: This disposition is nonprecedential.
United States Court of Appeals
for the Federal Circuit
______________________
GREE, INC.,
Appellant
v.
SUPERCELL OY,
Appellee
______________________
2020-2125
______________________
Appeal from the United States Patent and Trademark
Office, Patent Trial and Appeal Board in No. PGR2019-
00018.
______________________
Decided: May 10, 2021
______________________
SCOTT ANTHONY M CK EOWN , Ropes & Gray LLP, Wash-
ington, DC, for appellant. Also represented by D OUGLAS
H ALLWARD -D RIEMEIER , M ATTHEW R IZZOLO , K ATHRYN C.
THORNTON .
M ICHAEL JOHN SACKSTEDER , Fenwick & West LLP, San
Francisco, CA, for appellee. Also represented by TODD
RICHARD G REGORIAN ; JENNIFER RENE BUSH , Mountain
View, CA; G EOFFREY ROBERT M ILLER, New York, NY.
______________________
Case: 20-2125 Document: 39 Page: 1 Filed: 05/10/2021

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GREE, INC. v. SUPERCELL OY 2
Before TARANTO , L INN , and CHEN , Circuit Judges.
PER C URIAM.
GREE, Inc. (“GREE”) appeals the holding of the Patent
Trial and Appeal Board (“Board”) in a post-grant review
initiated by Supercell Oy (“Supercell”) that claims 1–20 of
GREE’s U.S. Patent Number 9,897,799 (“’799 patent”) are
directed to patent-ineligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C.
§ 101.
The Board, applying Alice Step 1, see Alice Corp. v. CLS
Bank Int’l, 573 U.S. 208, 216 (2014), held that the claims
were directed to “the abstract idea of associating game ob-
jects and moving one or more of the objects.” Supercell Oy
v. GREE, Inc., 2020 WL 2858715, at *9 (P.T.A.B. June 2,
2020) (“Board Op.”). Under Alice Step 2, the Board held
that neither the independent nor the dependent claims in-
cluded an inventive step and recited merely routine and
conventional steps that did not capture the particular im-
provements disclosed in the specifications. Id. at *11, *13–
15. The Board thus held that all instituted claims were
patent ineligible. Id. at *15. We review the Board’s deter-
mination of patent ineligibility absent factual disputes de
novo. DDR Holdings, LLC v. Hotels.com, L.P., 773 F.3d
1245, 1255 (Fed. Cir. 2014). We see no error in the Board’s
holding and thus affirm.
I. Independent Claims
Turning first to independent claims 1, 8, and 15, GREE
primarily argues that the claims are directed to a novel ges-
ture-driven control interface for computer gaming, and
that this is akin to patent-eligible improvements in com-
puter technology in Core Wireless Licensing S.A.R.L. v. LG
Electronics, Inc., 880 F.3d 1356, 1362–63 (Fed. Cir. 2018)
and Data Engine Technologies LLC. v. Google, LLC, 906
F.3d 999, 1008 (Fed. Cir. 2018).
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GREE, INC. v. SUPERCELL OY 3
We agree with the Board and Supercell that the claims
are directed to “the abstract idea of associating game ob-
jects and moving one or more of the objects” rather than to
an improvement in a graphic user interface. Claim 1 calls
for “[a] computer-implemented method for operating a com-
puter game,” comprising basic computer functionality
(storing and displaying data), “accepting, via an input face
configured to detect a touch operation, operation infor-
mation regarding a touch operation,” “determining, using
a processor, whether the operation information comprises
a direction operation,” moving “one or more of the plurality
of associated objects as a group in the direction indicated
by the direction operation,” and “displaying, on a computer
screen, the new arrangement on the game field.” Claims 8
and 15 are substantively identical, with the addition of a
“graphical user interface” in the preamble to claim 15.
The independent claims are not directed to an improve-
ment in the interface. As the Board correctly held, the
method of detecting a touch operation via the “input face”
is merely “incidental to the claimed method” needed only
“to manipulate these objects in accordance with the input
provided by a user.” Board Op. at *7; see also id. at *8 (not-
ing that the reference to an “input face” in claim 8 and the
“graphical user interface” in the preamble in claim 15 do
not focus claims 8 and 15 on the interface for the same rea-
sons as claim 1). The touch interface claimed is merely the
mechanism by which the focus of the invention—the move-
ment-based rules comprised of the remaining steps in the
claims—is executed. This is made clear by the patent’s
wholly generic claiming and description of the touch inter-
face, and the claiming of wholly generic touch-screen func-
tionality. Although the claims recite an “input face
configured to detect a touch operation,” this is the total ex-
tent of detail of the nature of the interface. The inclusion
of such “generalized steps to be performed on a computer
using conventional computer activity” does not render the
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GREE, INC. v. SUPERCELL OY 4
claims directed to improvements in computer technology.
See Enfish, LLC v. Microsoft Corp., 822 F.3d 1327, 1338
(Fed. Cir. 2016); see also In re TLI Commc’ns LLC Pat. Lit.,
823 F.3d 607, 612 (Fed. Cir. 2016) (holding that claims di-
rected to a method for recording digital images on a tele-
phone were not directed to an improvement to computer
functionality because “they are directed to the use of con-
ventional or generic technology in a nascent but well-
known environment” without “describ[ing] a new tele-
phone, a new server, or a new physical combination of the
two” or “any technical details for the tangible compo-
nents”).
The claims here are wholly unlike the claims we held
were directed to patent eligible subject matter in Core
Wireless. There, the claims called for the display of an ap-
plication summary window “that can be reached directly
from the menu” that displays application summaries while
the application is in “an un-launched state.” Core Wireless,
880 F.3d at 1359. We explained that the claims specified
“a particular manner by which the summary window must
be accessed,” included specific data to be included in the
summary and required that the applications exist in a par-
ticular state. Id. at 1362. We concluded that these limita-
tions, taken together, “disclose a specific manner of
displaying a limited set of information” as contrasted with
conventional user interface methods. Id. at 1363. Here, by
contrast, the user interface is described without specificity
at a generic level. The Board correctly explained that the
“claimed ‘input face’ is simply not claimed in sufficient de-
tail to require the type of specific user interface found to
transform the claims into a practical application in Core
Wireless, DDR Holdings, and other similar cases.” Board
Op. at *11. We also agree with the Board that the addition
of “a graphical user interface” in the preamble to claim 15
adds nothing to the generic claiming of the input face.
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GREE, INC. v. SUPERCELL OY 5
The claims are also unlike those directed to “a specific
method for navigating through three-dimensional elec-
tronic spreadsheets,” which we held to be patent eligible in
Data Engine. See 906 F.3d at 1008. There, the interface
“solved [a] known technological problem in computers in a
particular way,” and representative claim 12 “recite[d] spe-
cific steps detailing the method of navigating through
spreadsheet pages within a three-dimensional spread-
sheet.” Id. The independent claims here stand in stark
contrast because they recite only generic functionality of a
touch-screen—recognizing a touch and a movement opera-
tion—and thus recite merely the abstract idea of associat-
ing and moving an object on a screen.
Turning to Alice step 2, we agree with the Board that
nothing in the claims constitute an inventive step. As the
Board correctly held, each of the limitations separately and
in their ordered combination were routine and conven-
tional. GREE argues that the input face has the capacity
to distinguish between different types of operations; to wit,
the “syntax of touches, swipes, and their combination to
particular semantics, or the meaning of such operations.”
Appellant’s Br. at 54. We see no error in the Board’s con-
clusion that swipe operations were conventional, as dis-
closed in the specification’s discussion of the prior art. ’799
patent, col. 1, ll. 8–28. The Board also correctly explained
that none of the syntax of touches and swipes that GREE
cites as its inventive step are captured in any of the ele-
ments of the claims. See RecogniCorp, LLC v. Nintendo
Co., 855 F.3d 1322, 1327 (Fed. Cir. 2017). Moreover, the
claims do not recite the ability to move multiple objects
simultaneously; rather, the claims call for moving “one or
more of the plurality of associated objects as a group” (em-
phasis added). With respect to the ordered combination of
elements, we also agree with the Board that the associat-
ing, determining, and moving limitations are merely the
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GREE, INC. v. SUPERCELL OY 6
itemization of the abstract idea of associating game objects
and moving one or more of the objects.
We thus affirm the Board’s conclusion that independ-
ent claims 1, 8, and 15 are directed to patent-ineligible sub-
ject matter.
II. Dependent Claims
GREE summarily argues that claims 2, 9, and 16 add
the limitation “specifying operation,” by which a selected
object from the plurality of associated objects is not moved.
We see no error in the Board’s holding these claims recite
only patent-ineligible subject matter. As is the case with
the independent claims, neither the dependent claims
themselves nor the specification explains how the specify-
ing operation works except in generic terms.
GREE argues that claims 3–6, 10–13, and 17–19, which
include “a region into which an object is incapable of pro-
gressing,” provides a separate inventive step. Again, the
particulars of the processing of this limitation are recited
in the claims and described in the specification wholly ge-
nerically. It thus cannot form the basis of the inventive
step. The same is true of claims 7, 14, and 20, which in-
clude a limitation that the objects may change “direction.”
AFFIRMED
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