Another Software Patent Is “Abstract” – AudienceScience
Getting a patent issued does not end the debate over whether your invention is “inventive.” Under the “abstract idea” doctrine, a court may decide that your patented invention lacks enough of an “inventive concept” to qualify for protection. And it may do this at the pleadings stage, potentially before discovery even begins. The Federal Circuit’s September 25, 2026 nonprecedential decision in Receivership Estate of AudienceScience Inc. v. Google LLC illustrates that risk. The court affirmed a judgment on the pleadings invalidating claims of three internet advertising patents.
The representative claim recites a sequence of computer operations involving browsing histories, keyword mappings, and weighted selection. Yet those details did not satisfy the court. This is another example of the abstract-idea doctrine being used to knock down a patent for insufficient “inventiveness” without the rigor of an obviousness analysis, which would require: identifying what the prior art taught and explaining why a person skilled in the field would have arrived at the claimed invention.
Before looking at the representative claim, the takeaway is: include technical implementation details in the application and narrow dependent claims directed to those features. The narrower claims may cover fewer competing products, but they can provide fallback protection if the broader claims fall, and hopefully they demonstrate to the court that the inventors had more than just a high-level idea.
In step one of the analysis, the court writes a 9-word summary of the claim (emphasis added): “Thus, we conclude that the claim language, as a whole, is directed to the abstract idea of targeting advertisements to internet users to maximize revenue generation.”
The court then moves to step two of the analysis and decides that nothing in the claim is inventive enough: “the representative claim simply recites ‘attributing a selection weighting’ reflective of an advertisement’s ‘performance score’ that is indicative of the revenue that advertisement has generated. The claims do not explain in any greater specificity how this performance score concept is carried out.” (citation omitted)