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