The Federal Circuit held that patent claims covering all methods of achieving a technical result are invalid for insufficient written description when the specification discloses only one specific method, warning inventors that the scope of claims must be commensurate with what was actually disclose
The Federal Circuit affirmed that the term “board” in a decking patent was limited to material made from wood cut from a log, and did not encompass composite decking made from wood fibers and recycled plastic, illustrating the principle that claim terms must be construed in light of the
The Federal Circuit affirmed rejection of patent claims covering expressed sequence tags (ESTs) — partial gene sequences — for lack of utility under § 101, holding that ESTs that serve only as research tools without identification of the functions of their corresponding genes do not have the specifi
The Federal Circuit reversed the PTAB’s rejection of chimeric gene patent claims on written description grounds, holding that biotechnology patents need not recite the complete nucleotide sequence of claimed DNA when the sequences are already known in the field.
The Federal Circuit affirmed that Research In Motion’s BlackBerry system infringed NTP’s wireless email patents, holding that infringement can occur even when some system components are located in Canada, and distinguishing system claims from method claims for extraterritorial purposes.
In a landmark en banc decision, the Federal Circuit confirmed that patent claims must be interpreted in light of the patent’s own specification and prosecution history — not primarily by reference to dictionaries — establishing the modern framework for patent claim construction.
The Federal Circuit reversed an infringement judgment in a video-on-demand patent case, holding that the applicant’s prosecution argument distinguishing the prior art based on ‘point-to-point’ network interconnections created a prosecution disclaimer that limited all claims grouped
The Supreme Court unanimously held that Grokster could be liable for copyright infringement by inducing its users to infringe — adopting an inducement theory of secondary copyright liability and holding that a distributor who promotes infringing use through affirmative acts of encouragement can be h
The Supreme Court held that 35 U.S.C. § 271(e)(1)’s safe harbor exempts from patent infringement all uses of patented compounds that are reasonably related to generating information for an FDA submission, including preclinical studies that do not themselves produce data submitted to the FDA.
The Federal Circuit reversed the district court’s denial of a permanent injunction to MercExchange after eBay’s online auction system was found to infringe its patents, applying the court’s general rule that permanent injunctions issue in patent cases absent exceptional circumstanc