⚖ Oral Arguments, with Context

The Federal Circuit considers patents for mobile-device location services asserted against Uber. The patents describe ways to request location data within geographic regions and determine whether devices are moving together. The patent owner says these methods address network overload and tracking problems. It sued Uber for infringement, but the district court dismissed the case without a trial, finding the patent claims ineligible because they covered abstract information processing rather than a technological improvement. A related appeal involving Lyft is being heard alongside it. Eligibility concerns what patent law protects, not simply whether an invention is new. A patent claim defines the invention's legal boundaries. Under the Supreme Court's Alice framework, a claim directed to an abstract idea needs an additional inventive concept to qualify, considering its elements both individually and together. Merely using ordinary computer components is not enough. The patent owner's lawyer will argue that geographic limits change how the network works and that the court overlooked differences among the claims. Uber will answer that selecting less location information is merely filtering, not a specific technical advance. Listen also for whether one representative claim can stand in for the rest, and whether the alleged technical improvements could be rejected at the pleading stage, before factual disputes were developed.

Enovsys LLC v. Uber Technologies, Inc. (No. 25-1982) — U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, argued November 2, 2026.