Eastern District of Texas Chief Judge Rodney Gilstrap has adopted the report of Magistrate Judge Roy S. Payne recommending the denial of a Penney OpCo (d/b/a JCPenney) motion challenging patents asserted by Nearby Systems LLC, an Empire IP LLC plaintiff, against it under Alice. JCPenney argued that the claims of those patents are ineligibly directed to the abstract idea of “combining mapping data into a single map”; Judge Payne disagreed, recommending that “[w]hile the value and novelty of such a configuration is not at issue under §101, the Court is satisfied that it is sufficiently concrete to survive §101”. The court’s order likely dooms a parallel motion filed by another defendant in the campaign, Dollar General, which remains pending before Judges Payne and Gilstrap.