Last October, an Eastern District of Texas jury returned a mixed verdict awarding Ollnova Technologies Limited $11.5M from defendant Generac Holdings (ecobee) as a “lump sum royalty for the life of the patents” found infringed. A question concerning the second step of the Alice analysis of one of the patents-in-suit was submitted to that jury, which answered in Ollnova’s favor. Through its posttrial motions, ecobee asked Chief Judge Rodney Gilstrap to enter judgment as a matter of law in its favor as to that patent. The court has now refused, indicating that while the court ruled that its asserted claims—each considered “as a whole”—are drawn to an abstract idea as a matter of law, the jury considered the elements of those claims—individually or as an ordered combination—and reasonably found that ecobee failed to prove everything there to be merely conventional.