The Apple vs. Samsung patent war is one that has been going on for what seems like forever. Samsung is now invoking “Alice” to try and beat two Apple patents in an effort to gain the advantage. The patents in question are Apple’s “slide-to-unlock” patent, which describes swiping your smartphone’s home screen to unlock it and “universal search,” which refers to a universal interface for retrieving information in a computer system.

In May, a jury found Samsung to be guilty of infringing on the first patent but let it off the hook for the second. While Apple was only awarded an underwhelming $119.6 million (compared to the $1 billion it was awarded from Samsung in 2012), Samsung lawyers think they’ve come up with a way to invalidate the whole lawsuit: by taking advantage of a recent legal precedent called Alice vs. CLS Bank.

Originally taking place in June, the Supreme Court ruled that an abstract idea is not patentable on the grounds that it is simply tied to a computer system and can only be patented if it contains a sufficiently “inventive concept.” This is what Samsung lawyers recently argued on in a filing with the US District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose division. The lawyers argued that Apple’s ownership claims regard:

In the case regarding the “slide-to-unlock” patent, Samsung says that Apple is “simply using a computer to implement the abstract idea of moving a lock from a locked to unlocked position” and that the idea doesn’t conform to the demands of a patent, since there is no specific hardware or software involved.

According to an expert commenting on Apple’s universal search patent, the patent “is just basically, you know, a good idea,” and shouldn’t be patented either.

Apple hasn’t made any comments on the recent Samsung filing but if upheld it could have large implications for a number of technology especially because there are likely a large amount of “basically … good ideas” out there in a similar situation.

Source: PC World