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Category Archives: Alice

The Machine May Learn, But the Patent Won’t Survive: Federal Circuit Denies Rehearing in Recentive v. Fox

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On July 23, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit denied a petition for both panel and en banc rehearing in Recentive Analytics, Inc. v. Fox Corp., leaving in place its earlier precedential decision in the matter that applying standard machine learning techniques to a new environment is not enough to qualify for patent protection under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The court’s denial confirms its first major precedential decision on machine learning patents, suggesting a shift in how AI claims will be treated under § 101.

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It’s All Relative: Federal Circuit Upholds Invalidity of 23andMe’s Genetic Ancestry Testing Patent For Claiming a Rule of Nature

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23andMe, Inc. v. Ancestry.com DNA, LLC et al., Appeal No. 2019-1222 (Fed. Cir. Jan. 9, 2020)

The Federal Circuit has denied a petition for rehearing en banc brought by 23andMe, leaving in place the court’s earlier ruling on October 4, 2019, that the company’s patent, which describes a method for identifying the degree of relationship between two individuals based on their DNA samples, was invalid for claiming a rule of nature.

23andMe’s patent, U.S. Patent No. 8,463,554 (“Finding relatives in a database”), covers a method of comparing two individuals’ recombinable DNA sequence information—rather than the whole genome—in order to determine a relative relationship. According to 23andMe, the ‘554 patent explains that only relatives will share long stretches of genome regions where their recombinable DNA is completely or nearly identical. 23andMe sued Ancestry in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that it was infringing the ‘554 patent with its AncestryDNA kits, which feature services to identify relatives who share parts of their DNA.

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