The Federal Circuit vacated a $1.5 billion patent damages award against Microsoft, holding that the jury’s royalty base improperly relied on the entire market value of Microsoft’s products — including features unrelated to the patented invention — without proof that the patented feature
The Federal Circuit en banc held that the traditional four-factor preliminary injunction test applies in Hatch-Waxman patent cases — eliminating the prior practice under which a showing of validity and infringement created a presumption of irreparable harm — and remanded the preliminary injunction a
The Federal Circuit addressed the joint infringement problem in method patent claims — holding that when multiple parties each perform different steps of a claimed method, infringement requires that one party direct or control the actions of the other parties performing the remaining steps, setting
The Federal Circuit held that a patent application claiming an isolated DNA sequence encoding the NAIL protein receptor was obvious under KSR — where the prior art disclosed both the protein and routine methods of cloning its encoding gene — marking an important application of KSR’s flexible o
The Federal Circuit struck down a controversial USPTO rule that would have limited patent applicants’ right to file continuation applications claiming priority to parent patents, holding the rule was inconsistent with 35 U.S.C. § 120 — while upholding other procedural rules in the contested ru
The Federal Circuit affirmed the validity of Sanofi’s Plavix (clopidogrel) patent, holding that prior disclosure of a racemic mixture does not anticipate a claim to an isolated single enantiomer — particularly when the enantiomer exhibits unexpectedly superior properties not predictable from t
The Federal Circuit sitting en banc held that the machine-or-transformation test is the definitive standard for determining whether a claimed process is patent-eligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101, rejecting a patent application on a business method for hedging commodity-trading risk.
The Federal Circuit sitting en banc eliminated the two-part ‘point of novelty’ test for design patent infringement and replaced it with a unified ordinary observer test — holding that design patent infringement is determined by whether an ordinary observer, familiar with the prior art, w
The Federal Circuit held that violation of an open-source software license condition — not merely a contractual covenant — constitutes copyright infringement, giving open-source licensors the full array of copyright remedies (including injunctions and statutory damages) rather than only contract dam
The Federal Circuit held that direct infringement of a method claim divided across multiple parties requires that a single defendant direct or control the performance of every claimed step — a ruling that made it significantly harder to prove infringement of internet-era method patents implemented t