Federal Circuit patent decisions
The Federal Circuit held Mallinckrodt’s patents on methods of supplying inhaled nitric oxide therapy while monitoring patients for adverse effects were patent-ineligible under § 101 — finding the claims directed to the natural phenomenon that nitric oxide can worsen pulmonary edema in certain patients and the monitoring and adjusting steps conventional therapeutic practice.
The Federal Circuit reversed a $93 million foreign lost-profits award for ION’s domestic infringement under Section 271(f), holding that the presumption against extraterritoriality barred recovery for overseas contracts WesternGeco would have won absent the infringement — a ruling the Supreme Court reversed in 2018.
The Federal Circuit held that McRO’s patents on rule-based automated lip synchronization in 3D character animation were patent-eligible — the claims specified a particular improvement in computer animation technology using specific rules, not merely the abstract idea of using rules to automate a task, providing an important precedent for software patent eligibility post-Alice.
On remand from the Supreme Court’s Halo Electronics decision, the Federal Circuit affirmed the jury’s willfulness finding under the new subjective standard but vacated the enhanced damages award, instructing the district court to exercise its discretion anew — illustrating how post-Halo willfulness analysis shifts enhanced damages decisions back to district court discretion.
The Federal Circuit held that patents on real-time monitoring and analysis of electric power grid data were patent-ineligible under Section 101, establishing that collecting, analyzing, and displaying information — even in a complex industrial context — is an abstract idea without an inventive concept in its implementation.
The Federal Circuit affirmed the invalidity of Mentor Graphics’ patents on hardware synthesis software under § 101 — holding that claims directed to the abstract idea of synthesizing a hardware circuit design from a functional description were not rendered patent-eligible by implementation on a computer, and clarifying that the Alice two-step applies to software patents regardless of whether the claim recites a method, system, or computer-readable medium.
An en banc Federal Circuit held that a pharmaceutical company’s contract with a manufacturer to produce drug batches — where title to the product remained with the inventor — did not constitute a ‘commercial sale’ triggering the on-sale bar under Section 102(b), clarifying the boundaries between legitimate pre-commercial manufacturing and invalidating sales activity.
The Federal Circuit affirmed § 101 invalidity of Intellectual Ventures’ patents on interactive customizable web pages and database record indexing — holding that creating customizable web interfaces for financial products and organizing financial data with hierarchical index structures are abstract ideas not rendered patent-eligible by generic computer implementation.
The Federal Circuit vacated dismissal of BASCOM’s Internet content-filtering patent, holding that an inventive concept can arise from a non-conventional, non-generic arrangement of individually known elements — even if the abstract idea at the core of the claims is itself conventional.
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 step one and providing an important pathway for software patent eligibility.
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 unanimously reversed in 2017.
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 patent exhaustion ruling.
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 different structures matter even if the mathematical outputs are the same.
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 restrictions on trademark content.
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 when setting the royalty rate, requiring a FRAND-adjusted award.
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 federal court or jury — a foundational ruling for the PTAB system.
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 internet rather than importing physical goods.
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.S.C. § 282.
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 manner or timing of the performance.
An en banc Federal Circuit held 6-4 that the ITC has jurisdiction to issue exclusion orders for imported products that become ‘articles that infringe’ through induced infringement completed after importation — resolving a key question about the ITC’s reach over method patent claims and significantly expanding the ITC’s role in policing patent infringement.
The Federal Circuit affirmed the first covered business method patent review final written decision under the AIA, holding that the PTAB correctly invalidated Versata’s pricing patent under Section 101 and that CBM eligibility determinations are reviewable on appeal — establishing the Federal Circuit’s oversight role over the new PTAB CBM program.
An en banc Federal Circuit overruled its prior ‘strong presumption’ that claim terms without the word ‘means’ are not means-plus-function limitations, holding that terms like ‘module’ that claim a function without reciting sufficient structure are subject to Section 112’s means-plus-function rules — and typically invalidated for indefiniteness when the specification lacks corresponding structure.
The Federal Circuit held that Sequenom’s patent on detecting paternally inherited cell-free fetal DNA (cffDNA) in maternal blood for non-invasive prenatal diagnosis was patent-ineligible under § 101 — finding the claims directed to a natural phenomenon (cffDNA’s presence in maternal blood) and the detection method steps conventional and insufficient to supply an inventive concept.
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 affirmed infringement findings in a spinal implant patent case but remanded on damages, holding that lost profits are limited to products the patentee itself sells and that convoyed sales damages require a functional relationship between the patented and unpatented products — significantly narrowing the damages available to Warsaw Orthopedic.
In the first Federal Circuit decision reviewing an inter partes review (IPR) final written decision, the court affirmed the PTAB’s use of the ‘broadest reasonable interpretation’ claim construction standard in IPR proceedings — a ruling that set the rules for thousands of subsequent patent challenges.
The Federal Circuit affirmed that document-scanning and data-recognition patents are invalid under Section 101 as directed to long-practiced abstract ideas — and notably held that Section 101 invalidity can be decided at the motion to dismiss stage, before claim construction, establishing an early-exit tool in post-Alice patent litigation.
The Federal Circuit held that Myriad’s claims to methods of comparing or analyzing BRCA gene sequences were patent-ineligible under § 101 as directed to abstract mental processes — applying the Supreme Court’s Mayo framework to diagnostic comparison claims on remand from AMP v. Myriad, while upholding claims requiring specific laboratory techniques.
The Federal Circuit held that exporting a single ‘main’ or ‘essential’ component of a patented multi-component product from the U.S. can constitute infringement under Section 271(f)(1) — a ruling the Supreme Court unanimously reversed in 2017, holding that a single component is categorically insufficient.
The Federal Circuit held that DDR Holdings’ patent on a method for retaining website visitors by displaying third-party products within the host website’s visual framework — rather than redirecting visitors to the third-party’s site — was patent-eligible under Alice because the claims addressed a problem unique to the internet and produced an unconventional technical result.
The Federal Circuit provided the most comprehensive guidance yet on how to calculate reasonable royalties for standard-essential patents (SEPs) subject to FRAND commitments, holding that damages must reflect incremental value of the invention rather than value derived from standardization, and that hold-up and royalty-stacking concerns require evidentiary support.
On its third visit to the Federal Circuit, Ultramercial’s patent on ad-supported online media distribution was finally struck down as an abstract idea — completing a legal journey that spanned four years, two Federal Circuit opinions, and two Supreme Court remands, all bookended by the Alice decision.
The Federal Circuit affirmed its two-part Seagate test for enhanced patent damages, refusing to award treble damages even where a jury found willful infringement — a holding the Supreme Court would reverse in 2016 by eliminating the objective recklessness requirement and restoring broader district court discretion.
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 accused product itself.
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 the district court’s claim construction — one of the first Federal Circuit applications of the Nautilus ‘reasonable certainty’ test.
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 remanding on the royalty base for activities occurring outside the United States.
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 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 question that the Supreme Court ultimately resolved in Google’s favor in 2021.
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 license on reasonable terms.
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 clear error rather than de novo.
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 — even though the district court had already entered final judgment in the patentee’s favor.
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 not a defense to inducement.
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 to the abstract idea of monetizing digital content through advertising, invalidating the patent.
The Federal Circuit, sitting en banc, affirmed invalidity of Alice’s financial settlement software patent claims — but produced seven separate opinions with no majority rationale, reflecting deep disagreement on how to apply § 101 to software and setting the stage for the Supreme Court’s definitive Alice v. CLS Bank decision in 2014.
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 Supreme Court’s landmark Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank decision.
The Federal Circuit affirmed a $391 million patent infringement judgment against SAP — then the largest software patent damages award ever affirmed on appeal — for infringement of Versata’s product pricing patents, while vacating an overbroad injunction.
The Federal Circuit held that the term ‘spaced relationship’ in a heart rate monitor patent was not indefinite because it was ‘amenable to construction’ and not ‘insolubly ambiguous’ — applying its then-prevailing indefiniteness test that the Supreme Court unanimously rejected in 2014, replacing it with the ‘reasonable certainty’ standard that governs today.
The Federal Circuit, sitting en banc, affirmed the Cybor de novo standard of review for claim construction — declining to overturn its 1998 precedent requiring appellate courts to review district court claim construction rulings without deference, in a decision that set the stage for the Supreme Court’s subsequent reversal in Teva v. Sandoz (2015).