The Federal Circuit upheld denial and dissolution of preliminary relief where accused products practiced a later-issued, presumptively valid design patent.
A Northern California jury found Quince’s shearling boot infringed Deckers’ design patent on the UGG Classic Ultra Mini Boot upper — but simultaneously invalidated the patent as obvious in light of a crowded prior-art field, leaving Deckers without relief.
A Northern District of California judge barred both parties from presenting reasonable royalty damages or willful infringement evidence at an upcoming UGG design patent trial, applying judicial estoppel to prevent Quince from advancing a damages theory it had previously blocked Deckers from pursuing.
A federal court in Texas entered a $12.97 million judgment and permanent injunction against Talaria for willfully infringing Surron’s design patent covering its popular Light Bee electric off-road motorcycle.
In a precedent-setting design patent case, the Federal Circuit held that comparison prior art used to defend against infringement must be drawn from the same article of manufacture claimed in the design patent — prior art from a different type of product cannot be used to confuse the ordinary observer comparison.
The Federal Circuit reversed a summary judgment of patent invalidity for anticipation, finding genuine disputes about whether the alleged prior art product predated the patent’s critical date, and separately affirmed that Mosaic’s claimed trade dress was invalid as functional.
The Federal Circuit issued two precedential opinions vacating preliminary injunctions in hoverboard design patent cases, holding that courts must conduct product-by-product infringement analysis under the ordinary observer test and properly account for prior art when evaluating likelihood of success.
The Federal Circuit held that a detailed price quotation letter sent before the patent critical date constituted a commercial offer for sale that triggered the on-sale bar, invalidating a design patent for a medical device handle.
The Federal Circuit reversed a design patent rejection, holding that prior art can only anticipate a design patent claim if the prior art reference discloses a design applied to the same article of manufacture identified in the claim — a design for an art tool cannot anticipate a design for a lip implant.
The Federal Circuit reversed a PTAB finding that two Gamon Plus gravity-feed dispenser design patents were not obvious, holding that secondary considerations lacked nexus to the claimed design and could not overcome the strong prima facie case of obviousness.
On remand from the Supreme Court’s Samsung v. Apple decision, the Federal Circuit declined to define the legal test for identifying the ‘article of manufacture’ in design patent damages and instead sent the case back to the district court to resolve the issue in the first instance — prolonging one of the most consequential design patent damages cases in U.S. history.
The Supreme Court held that in design patent infringement, the infringer’s profits need not be calculated based on the entire end product; courts must identify the relevant ‘article of manufacture’ to which the design was applied.
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 constitutes an ‘article of manufacture.’
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, would find the accused design substantially similar to the patented design.