Data Compression Patent Eligibility

In a recent Federal Circuit decision, Realtime Data, LLC v. Iancu, No. 18-1154 (Fed. Cir. 2019), Realtime Data LLC’s claims for a system for data compression were invalid as obvious in view of prior art. The Federal Circuit affirmed the decision of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB)’s that the claims involving data compression through “dictionary encoding” were covered by a prior invention and a well-known data compression textbook. The Federal Circuit found that the prior art references were “well-known” and that there was sufficient evidence that a person of ordinary skill in the art would use the cited prior art when researching compression algorithms.