Banks and other financial institutions may be the next targets of claims arising from a family of patents that ran into Alice trouble the first time around. Inventor-controlled Texas Secure Authentication, LLC has accused FCT Bancshares (First National Bank of Central Texas) (6:20-cv-01091) of infringing a single patent, generally related to determining identification through multiple information containers and registers, through the use of multi-factor authentication methods in its online banking and Internet services. The named inventor moved the asserted patent away from Evolutionary Intelligence LLC, which sued Apple, Facebook, Foursquare, Groupon, LivingSocial, Millienial Media, Sprint, Twitter, and Yelp in a pre-Alice campaign that met its patent-ineligibility demise in October 2015.

In response to a petition filed by Apple, the USPTO is instituting an inter partes review (IPR) of an Evolutionary Intelligence patent. In October 2013 Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp challenged claims of two Evolutionary Intelligence patents related to data analysis within a computer network (7,010,536, 7,702,682). Facebook filed a petition for IPR of claims 15 and 16 of ‘536, and Twitter and Yelp jointly filed a petition for IPR of claims 1-16 of ‘536. That same month Apple filed several IPR petitions challenging claims 1-16 of ‘536 and also claims 1-23 of ‘682. The petitioners requested cancellation of claims 1-16 of the ‘536 patent as being anticipated by previous patents. In its challenge of ‘682, Apple argued that claims 1-23 of the patent are anticipated and/or obvious over prior art. All of the companies’ bids for IPR were rejected with the exception of Apple’s challenge of claims 2-12, 14, and 16 of ‘536. In a decision released last week, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board granted inter partes review of those claims as being anticipated by a previous patent (5,836,529).