The Federal Circuit vacated a $368 million patent verdict against Cisco and Apple in VirnetX’s network security patent case, rejecting the Nash Bargaining Solution as a royalty methodology and requiring strict apportionment to the patented features even when the smallest salable unit is the ac
The Federal Circuit applied the Supreme Court’s newly articulated Nautilus indefiniteness standard to Interval Licensing’s ‘attention manager’ patents, affirming that numerous claims were indefinite while vacating non-infringement findings on other claims based on errors in t
Applying the newly minted Alice framework, the Federal Circuit unanimously invalidated buySAFE’s patent on computer-facilitated transaction guarantees, holding that using a computer to create a contractual bonding relationship is textbook abstract idea territory with no inventive concept.
The Federal Circuit affirmed a landmark $1.5 billion damages award against Marvell Technology for willful infringement of Carnegie Mellon University’s hard drive signal processing patents — one of the largest patent verdicts in history — while vacating parts of the damages calculation and rema
The Federal Circuit held that a patent claiming an image device profile — a collection of color and spatial data — was patent-ineligible, finding that a data structure without physical embodiment is not patentable, and that methods consisting only of mathematical correlations are abstract ideas.
The Supreme Court held 6–3 that Aereo’s service — which captured over-the-air broadcasts using thousands of tiny antennas and streamed them to individual subscribers — performed copyrighted works publicly and infringed broadcasters’ exclusive public performance right.
The Supreme Court held unanimously that software claims directed to the abstract idea of intermediated settlement, implemented on a generic computer, are patent-ineligible under §101, and articulated the two-step Alice/Mayo framework now universally applied to §101 analysis.
The Supreme Court held that competitors may bring Lanham Act false advertising claims challenging product labels even when those labels have been approved or regulated under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.
The Supreme Court held that patent claims are indefinite and invalid if they fail to inform a skilled artisan with reasonable certainty about the scope of the invention, rejecting the Federal Circuit’s overly lenient ‘insolubly ambiguous’ standard.
The Supreme Court held 6–3 that the equitable defense of laches cannot bar a copyright infringement claim for damages filed within the Copyright Act’s three-year statute of limitations.
The Federal Circuit reversed the district court and held that Oracle’s Java API declaring code and the structure, sequence, and organization of its API packages are entitled to copyright protection — reversing the landmark ruling that APIs were not copyrightable and remanding the fair use ques
The Supreme Court held that §285 ‘exceptional case’ fee-shifting requires only that the case stands out from others in the substantive strength of a party’s position or the unreasonable manner of litigation, rejecting the Federal Circuit’s rigid Brooks Furniture two-prong tes
The Supreme Court held that appellate courts must review §285 exceptional case determinations for abuse of discretion — not de novo — deferring to district courts that are best positioned to evaluate litigation conduct over the life of a case.
The Federal Circuit reversed Judge Posner’s dismissal of patent damages claims and held there is no categorical rule barring injunctions for standard-essential patents — but affirmed that Motorola could not obtain an injunction on its FRAND-committed SEP because it had already committed to lic
The Supreme Court held unanimously that in a licensee’s declaratory judgment action for non-infringement, the patentee bears the burden of proving infringement — the same burden as in an ordinary infringement suit.
A divided Federal Circuit panel held Accenture’s insurance task-management system patent invalid under Section 101, finding that adding computer and insurance-industry labels to an abstract idea does not make a claim patent-eligible.
The Federal Circuit applied de novo review to all aspects of claim construction and affirmed the invalidity of Teva’s multiple sclerosis drug patents — a ruling the Supreme Court partially reversed in 2015, holding that underlying factual findings in claim construction must be reviewed for cle
The Federal Circuit affirmed the ITC’s exclusion order against Huawei and ZTE for infringing InterDigital’s standard-essential wireless patents, while clarifying important questions about the ITC’s authority to issue exclusion orders involving FRAND-committed patents — decisions th
The Federal Circuit held that when the PTO cancels a patent’s claims during reexamination proceedings that conclude while district court litigation is still pending on appeal, the cancellation moot the district court judgment of infringement — there is no longer a valid patent to infringe — ev
The Federal Circuit held that a defendant’s good-faith belief that the asserted patent is invalid can negate the specific intent required for induced infringement — a ruling the Supreme Court reversed in 2015, clarifying that validity and infringement are separate inquiries and invalidity is n
The Federal Circuit initially held Ultramercial’s patent on a method of distributing copyrighted media over the internet by requiring viewers to watch an advertisement to be patent-eligible — but after Supreme Court remand in light of Alice v. CLS Bank, reversed and found the claims directed t
The Supreme Court held that naturally occurring DNA segments are products of nature and not patent-eligible, but that synthetically created cDNA is patent-eligible because it does not exist in that form in nature.
The Supreme Court held unanimously that the patent exhaustion doctrine does not permit a farmer to reproduce patented self-replicating seeds; exhaustion covers only the authorized sale of the original seeds, not progeny crops grown from them.
Ten Federal Circuit judges issued seven different opinions and could not agree on a single legal standard for software patent eligibility under § 101, affirming by an evenly divided court that Alice’s financial settlement patents were invalid — a fractured ruling that led directly to the Supre