Federal Circuit Finds RFID Tagging Claims Patentable

On December 16, in Adasa Inc. v. Avery Dennison Corporation, the Federal Circuit upheld patentability of claims reciting an RFID transponder with storage for a particular type of serial number—affirming the district court’s summary judgment that claim 1 of U.S. Patent No. 9,798,967 satisfies 35 U.S.C § 101.

 The decision is among a handful of cases where the court has found improvements in data indexing and data structures to be patent-eligible subject matter and not unpatentable abstract ideas.

To ensure each RFID tag is commissioned to a unique code, the RFID industry assigns each tag a serialized object number (Electronic Product Code or EPC) in accordance with global formatting standards. Each EPC comprises object class information and a serial number. To ensure serial number uniqueness, a central authority issues EPC numbers from a central database for manufacturers, products, and items based on a strategic serialization that avoids duplication.