A Delaware judge has issued a noninfringement ruling for) in a long-running database lawsuit waged by Data Engine Technologies LLC , a subsidiary of Acacia Research Corporation . On September 9, Chief District Judge Leonard Stark ruled that Google Sheets does not infringe the asserted claims of the three remaining patents-in-suit, holding that the product does not involve “three-dimensional electronic spreadsheets”, a key claim limitation, as construed by the court. Those three patents previously survived a trip down therabbit hole: Judge Stark ruled in 2016 that the patents were invalid as unpatentably directed to an abstract idea, but the Federal Circuit reversed that conclusion in 2018 as to all but a single claim, holding instead that the patents’ subject matter described nonabstract improvements to computer database technology.