In the latest legal battle between Australian franchise chain Body Fit Training (BFT) and US-based F45 Training, a federal district court in Delaware, US, has ruled in favour of BFT, describing F45’s patent as ‘invalid’.

F45 had accused BFT of infringing F45’s ‘890 patent’ – US Patent Number 10,143,890 – arguing that “BFT’s system for operating its fitness studios, including the use of .BFT files, infringes the claims of the ‘890 patent”.

Industry veteran and ‘expert’ in the case for F45 Bryan K O'Rourke, stated in court that in the fitness industry he “never saw anything like or closely resembling the invention of the ‘890 patent’ or the fitness phenomenon enabled by that invention”.

Other witnesses also defended the patent, but the court responded that while “evidence cited by Mr O’Rourke touts the commercial success of F45’s studios…the commercial success of a patentee’s product does not necessarily indicate that the company’s patent contains an inventive concept”.

The court concluded that “the evidence fails to tie the ‘member experience’ in the F45 studios to the specific steps set forth in the claims” as the model is “mainly tied to the use of computer displays in place of human instructors, which is not an ‘inventive concept’. Thus all claims relating to the ‘890 patent’ were deemed invalid.

Willkie’s Tech Patent Litigation group secured the win for BFT. The law firm stated: “As Judge Bryson found, Body Fit Training demonstrated that the ’890 patent’ was invalid under 35 USC § 101 for claiming patent-ineligible subject matter, because its claims were directed to generic and abstract concepts, and recited only well-understood, routine, and conventional activities well-known in the fitness and computing industries.”

The legal dispute over patent infringement between the two fitness franchises began in late 2019, when F45 filed a lawsuit in the Australian Federal Court against BFT over alleged patent infringement. In 2020, BFT filed a lawsuit against F45 attempting to invalidate two of its patents. The following year, BFT’s CEOs Cameron Falloon and Richard Burnet sold its US and Canadian rights to Xponential Fitness for US$44m (AUS$66) and in February 2022, the two F45 patents were ruled invalid by the Australian Federal court.