The Federal Circuit affirmed § 101 invalidity of Intellectual Ventures’ patents on interactive customizable web pages and database record indexing — holding that creating customizable web interfaces for financial products and organizing financial data with hierarchical index structures are abs
The Federal Circuit vacated dismissal of BASCOM’s Internet content-filtering patent, holding that an inventive concept can arise from a non-conventional, non-generic arrangement of individually known elements — even if the abstract idea at the core of the claims is itself conventional.
The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s use of the ‘broadest reasonable interpretation’ standard for claim construction in inter partes review proceedings — validating the PTO’s approach over patent holders’ objections that IPR should us
The Supreme Court unanimously held that courts awarding attorney fees under the Copyright Act must give substantial weight to the objective reasonableness of the losing party’s litigation position, while retaining discretion to weigh all other relevant factors.
The Supreme Court unanimously overruled the Federal Circuit’s Seagate objective-recklessness test for willful patent infringement and enhanced damages under § 284 — holding that courts have broad discretion to award enhanced damages in egregious cases of deliberate or wanton infringement, with
The Federal Circuit held that claims directed to a specific improvement in database technology — a self-referential logical table that allows all types of data to be stored in a single table structure — were directed to a concrete software improvement rather than an abstract idea, surviving Alice st
The Federal Circuit denied mandamus to TC Heartland, a company challenging patent venue in the District of Delaware, deferring to its own longstanding rule that domestic corporations can be sued for patent infringement wherever they are subject to personal jurisdiction — a position the Supreme Court
An en banc Federal Circuit held that a patent owner’s restricted domestic sales don’t exhaust patent rights when clearly communicated restrictions are violated, and that foreign sales never exhaust U.S. patent rights — both holdings later reversed by the Supreme Court in a landmark 2017
The Federal Circuit affirmed a jury verdict of non-infringement for Apple in a wireless patent case, holding that even mathematically equivalent signal-processing operations implemented through structurally different hardware pipelines are not equivalent under the doctrine of equivalents — the diffe
An en banc Federal Circuit held that Section 2(a) of the Lanham Act, which bars registration of ‘disparaging’ trademarks, violates the First Amendment — a landmark ruling that the Supreme Court affirmed in Matal v. Tam (2017), eliminating one of trademark law’s longest-standing res
The Federal Circuit held that there is no universal rule requiring patent damages models to begin with the smallest saleable patent-practicing unit — but remanded CSIRO’s Wi-Fi patent damages award because the district court failed to account for the patent’s standard-essential status wh
The Federal Circuit unanimously rejected a patent holder’s constitutional challenge to inter partes review, holding that IPR proceedings do not violate Article III or the Seventh Amendment because patents are public rights that may be adjudicated by an administrative agency without access to a
The Federal Circuit held that the ITC’s Section 337 jurisdiction covers only physical ‘articles’ and does not extend to electronic transmissions of digital data — blocking the ITC from issuing exclusion orders against competitors that infringe by transmitting digital files over the
In a 6-5 en banc decision, the Federal Circuit held that laches remains a valid defense that can bar recovery of pre-suit patent damages — splitting from the Supreme Court’s copyright ruling in Petrella v. MGM and ruling that Congress had separately codified laches as a patent defense in 35 U.
On remand from the Supreme Court, an en banc Federal Circuit expanded direct infringement liability beyond the single-actor rule, holding that an entity can be liable for another’s performance of method steps when it conditions participation or a benefit on that performance and establishes the
An en banc Federal Circuit held 6-4 that the ITC has jurisdiction to issue exclusion orders for imported products that become ‘articles that infringe’ through induced infringement completed after importation — resolving a key question about the ITC’s reach over method patent claims
The Federal Circuit affirmed the first covered business method patent review final written decision under the AIA, holding that the PTAB correctly invalidated Versata’s pricing patent under Section 101 and that CBM eligibility determinations are reviewable on appeal — establishing the Federal
The Supreme Court reaffirmed the Brulotte rule that agreements requiring patent royalty payments beyond a patent’s expiration date are unenforceable as a matter of law.
An en banc Federal Circuit overruled its prior ‘strong presumption’ that claim terms without the word ‘means’ are not means-plus-function limitations, holding that terms like ‘module’ that claim a function without reciting sufficient structure are subject to Secti
The Federal Circuit held that Sequenom’s patent on detecting paternally inherited cell-free fetal DNA (cffDNA) in maternal blood for non-invasive prenatal diagnosis was patent-ineligible under § 101 — finding the claims directed to a natural phenomenon (cffDNA’s presence in maternal bloo
The Supreme Court held 6-2 that a defendant’s good-faith belief that a patent is invalid is not a defense to induced infringement liability under § 271(b) — distinguishing between validity and infringement and holding that invalidity must be raised as a defense, not as a shield against the kno
The Federal Circuit affirmed the bulk of Apple’s massive patent verdict against Samsung — including design patent damages calculated on Samsung’s entire smartphone profits rather than just infringing components — a ruling later reversed by the Supreme Court in a landmark decision on what
The Supreme Court held that TTAB likelihood-of-confusion decisions on trademark registration can preclude relitigation of the same issue in a federal court infringement suit when the usages adjudicated are materially the same.
The Federal Circuit affirmed infringement findings in a spinal implant patent case but remanded on damages, holding that lost profits are limited to products the patentee itself sells and that convoyed sales damages require a functional relationship between the patented and unpatented products — sig