Section 101: It Is Called Gardening – and Soccer Thoughts!
Tell me, O Muse, of the man who sought to water his vines by sensor and signal, who wandered far through the federal courts after setting forth from the vineyards of California. (Sorry.)
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California recently granted summary judgment under Section 101 in Vineyard Investigations v. E. & J. Gallo Winery (E.D. Cal., July 2, 2026). Let's get into it.
The Background
Vineyard Investigations is a wine industry consulting company and owns three patents covering automated vineyard irrigation systems. The asserted patents cover systems that combine local sensor data with external data (weather, evapotranspiration coefficients) to control when water and chemicals get dispensed to grapevines. The defendant is E. & J. Gallo Winery.
The court granted Gallo summary judgment on both non-infringement and Section 101 invalidity, but we'll focus on Section 101.
Alice Step One: "It Is Called Gardening"
The court applied Alice to representative claims and found the claims directed to the abstract idea of providing water, nutrients or chemicals to each plant based on sensor data and external data. Not a specific technological improvement to irrigation systems. Just … watering plants differently depending on conditions. And then the court said this:
Many members of the public engage in such an activity every weekend … It is called gardening.
You can see where this is going.
Result-Focused Functional Language: The claims describe what you want to happen: delivering water and nutrients based on data. But they don't specify how to do it. The specification confirms that any type of control system can be used, data can be processed in any manner, and application methods can follow "academic papers" or "publicly available data."
Generic, Conventional Components: The specification describes the sensors, controllers and emitters generically. Deployment of sensors is "very simple" and sensors "can be arbitrarily set at any point." The plaintiff admitted he didn't invent a new sensor, and he used "sensors of the type I was placing in my backyard." He didn't improve signal transmission. He didn't improve emitter function. In short, the court found it was off-the-shelf technology.
Preemption Concerns: The breadth of these claims covers all manners of optimizing an irrigation system using one of a limited number of known methods to obtain plant-specific data and macro-level external data. The scope, the court found, is a preemption problem.
The court offered a hypothetical: If you gave a random group of competent agricultural engineers the simple instruction to water two apple trees differently based on weather and need using conventional technology, they'd all likely land on something that looks like the patents-in-suit.
Alice Step Two: No Inventive Concept
At step two, the court found no inventive concept. Associating a sensor with a plant is a necessary part of the abstract idea itself, and it cannot supply the inventive concept. The ordered combination of elements – place sensor near plant, get sensor data, get external data, analyze data, control irrigation – is organized in an expected, logical way.
The court also rejected the plaintiff's attempt to import indicia of non-obviousness into the Section 101 inquiry, holding that secondary considerations under Section 103 (such as the Patent Trial and Appeals Board's rejection of obviousness challenges or praise for the "experimental vineyards") are irrelevant to eligibility. And field-of-use limitations (e.g., restricting the claims to vineyard irrigation) don't rescue an otherwise abstract idea.
The Court Reverses Itself
Here's what makes this case particularly interesting: The court revisited and effectively reversed its own prior motion-to-dismiss ruling. That earlier order found an inventive concept in combining "a garden variety of non-specific external data" such as weather and evapotranspiration data with in-field sensor data. On the developed summary judgment record, the court acknowledged it had erred – merely directing people to consider two broad categories of data and make nonspecific decisions falls within the meaning of an abstract idea.
The plaintiff complained, but the court said it would be more sympathetic if this were a private breach-of-contract dispute. Patents are a form of public monopoly, and there is a strong public interest in resolving the validity of dubious patents, especially given that patent law lacks fair use or independent creation defenses.
The Practitioner Takeaway: The Missing How (Again)
This case is a clean illustration of the "missing how" problem. Result-oriented claims dressed up with generic technology won't survive Alice.
We saw the same theme in Recentive Analytics v. Fox Corp. (Fed. Cir. April 18, 2025), where the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rejected machine learning claims for lacking a "how" – i.e., not describing the specific technical mechanism of improvement, just applying known machine learning techniques to a new data domain. The pattern is consistent and the lesson straightforward: Courts are increasingly willing to look past tech-sounding vocabulary and ask what technology the claims actually advance.
Let's Talk Soccer
The World Cup
The World Cup was great. It's also over, and I'm sad about that.
On the final: Spain deserved it. They were the best team in the tournament, and the best team won. No complaints. (I'm sure Argentina not getting a shot on goal led to some complaints for our casual observers.)
One of my favorite parts was watching international visitors experience the United States. I'm sure some of that was staged, some of that was to gain followers, but I loved it, nonetheless.
The energy in the host cities seemed great: various flags draped over everything, chanting in languages you don't understand, people singing Oasis, drinking Boston out of beer. It was genuinely fun. The whole country felt different for a month.
And here is a broader point: Sometimes, you just have to buy the tickets and set up an out-of-office message. Some moments aren't coming back around. You can't always wait for a "better time" or a time when you're not so busy.
I went to the Netherlands vs. Tunisia match with my dad and my son, who is 4 and a half. Three generations at a World Cup game in the United States. My son might not remember wearing the full Donyell Malen kit (Daje Roma) or the near-constant Dutch singing. But I will, and my dad will. Surrounded by orange, my kid clapped for every shot. He thought both teams were his team – and they were.
It was one of those small, perfect windows you don't pass up because no matter what you do, that window closes eventually.
AS Roma and the Champions League
I'm really late here, but I need to write about it because I'm still shocked it happened. AS Roma qualified for the Champions League.
As the kids say, the vibes were not immaculate, but they somehow pulled it off, rattling off an absolutely unreal run over the final 10 matches of the season. Win after win in situations where Roma teams of years past would have found creative ways to draw or lose. I do not know how to explain it, but it happened, and I'm looking forward to Anno Due of the Gasperini Era. There is, again, hope in the Eternal City. Daje Roma.
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As always, thanks for reading. Did I miss something? Want to talk about Roma's Champions League credentials, the World Cup or gardening patent? Please email me.