At the end of last year, Western District of Texas Judge Alan D. Albright dismissed a July 2020 complaint filed by Health Discovery Corporation (HDC) against Intel for failure to plead sufficient facts to withstand defendant Intel’s Alice challenge to the four pattern recognition patents asserted. The court did so without prejudice, however, citing a sister court’s nod to the “wide gulf” between meeting the clear and convincing evidence standard for outright invalidation and mere pleading failures. In February, HDC filed its appeal of Judge Albright’s ruling to the Federal Circuit (22-1446), following up this month with a new complaint that asserts the same four patents against Intel (6:22-cv-00356), this time adding roughly 20 paragraphs that plead defensively against another patent eligibility attack.   

Western District of Texas Judge Alan D. Albright has become well known for his restrictive posture toward certain defensive motions in patent litigation, including convenience transfer motions, requests to stay litigation pending the outcome of America Invents Act (AIA) reviews, and patent eligibility challenges. While Judge Albright has granted such motions to transfer or stay on occasion, he had previously never invalidated a patent under Section 101—but that changed just as 2021 drew to a close. The invalidations capped off a year in which Judge Albright again had more patent litigation fall in his courtroom than any other judge, as noted in RPX’s fourth-quarter review.

Publicly traded Health Discovery Corporation (HDC) has sued Intel (6:20-cv-00666) over four pattern recognition patents identified as teaching “Support Vector Machine-Recursive Feature Elimination” (SVM-RFE) methods. Intel is accused of infringement through the provision of certain processors, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), Systems-on-Chip (SoCs), and software that are “tested, validated, verified, and optimized” allegedly using the “SVM-RFE” method. HDC and Intel have a history, with the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) presiding over a near decade long interference between the two.