Federal Circuit Judge Richard Taranto. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi / ALM

Big technology companies do not always get their way on patents at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Just ask HTC Corp. and Amazon.com Inc.

The two lost separate attempts Friday to shield themselves from computer security patents asserted by much smaller companies.

In Ancora Technologies v. HTC America, the court reversed a decision by U.S. District Judge Richard Jones of the Western District of Washington that had invalidated Ancora Technologies Inc.'s 6,411,941 patent.

The patent claims a method of creating a “verification structure” in a computer's BIOS memory. Jones had held the patent's focus was on “the abstract concept of selecting a program, verifying whether the program is licensed, and acting on the program according to the verification.”

The Federal Circuit disagreed in a decision by Judge Richard Taranto. He noted that BIOS memory is usually associated with startup functions, not security. “The claimed advance is a concrete assignment of specified functions among a computer’s components to improve computer security, and this claimed improvement in computer functionality is eligible for patenting,” he wrote.

Mark Lorelli of Brooks Kushman had the winning argument for Ancora. Knobbe Martens represented HTC.

Amazon, meanwhile, is trying to invalidate patents that cybersecurity company ZitoVault Inc. is asserting against it in the Western District of Washington. Amazon challenged ZitoVault's 6,484,257 patent on encrypted communications before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, but the PTAB found it patentable.

The key issue was construction of the phrase “cryptographic sessions” in the patent claims. The PTAB had construed "sessions" as data streams that have recognizable beginning and end points. It found that Amazon's prior art didn't meet that limitation.

On Friday, Federal Circuit Judge Kara Stoll wrote for a 2-1 majority that the PTAB had it right. Amazon's own expert had acknowledged that sessions have start and end times, she wrote. “Moreover, both parties agreed to the board’s construction” at the PTAB's oral hearing, she added.

Judge Kathleen O'Malley concurred.

Chief Judge Sharon Prost dissented, saying the board had improperly read in the “recognizable beginning” and “recognizable ending” requirements from the patent's specification. “Nothing in the '257 patent excludes the possibility that a session may end simply because no more data is transmitted,” she wrote.

Caldwell Cassady & Curry partner Justin Nemunaitis argued the appeal for ZitoVault. Amazon was represented by Perkins Coie.