In applying the Alice standard, the court ruled that “[b]ecause the asserted claims are directed to an abstract idea and nothing in the claims comprises an inventive concept, TRA claims are patent-ineligible. Under step one of Alice, the court stated that the “abstract nature of TRA’s patent is confirmed by the fact that TRA’s claim, as a whole, can be performed by humans rather than computers” and are therefore, “directed towards a patent-ineligible abstract idea.” Under step two of Alice, the court found that the asserted claims lacked an inventive concept stating that “claim 71 of the ‘940 patent recites only “well-understood, routine, [or] conventional activities” such as data collection, data storage, and routine ‘post-solution’ activities (activities performed on the data following the double-blind match) that are insufficiently inventive to render TRA’s claims patentable.”
TNS Media Research LLC et al. v. TiVo Research and Analytics Inc., Case No. 1:11-cv-04039 (S.D.N.Y. Feb. 22, 2016) (Scheindlin, J.).)