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.
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.
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 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 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 test.
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 license on reasonable terms.
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.
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 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 that became focal points for global SEP licensing and ITC reform debates.
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 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.
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).
The Federal Circuit affirmed a district court’s post-trial entry of judgment as a matter of law for Apple, overturning a $208 million jury verdict and holding that Apple’s Spotlight, Cover Flow, and Time Machine features did not infringe patents covering chronologically organized data stream interfaces.
The Federal Circuit sitting en banc held that a party who induces multiple actors to collectively perform all steps of a method patent claim can be liable for induced infringement even if no single party directly infringes all steps — significantly expanding liability for divided infringement of internet and software method patents.
The Federal Circuit reversed an obviousness finding in a Hatch-Waxman dispute over method-of-treatment patents covering naproxen-esomeprazole combination therapy for treating pain while reducing gastrointestinal damage — holding that the district court failed to properly analyze the motivation to combine the specific drugs in the specific claimed dosing regimen.
The Federal Circuit affirmed a $371 million enhanced damages award against W.L. Gore for willful infringement of Bard’s vascular graft patent — one of the largest patent verdicts in history — holding that Gore’s employee did not qualify as a joint inventor and that the pioneering PTFE graft invention belonged solely to Bard’s inventor, Dr. Robert Goldfarb.
The Supreme Court held that the Hatch-Waxman Act permits generic drug manufacturers to bring counterclaims to correct overbroad Orange Book use codes that improperly block FDA approval for non-patented uses of a drug.
The Federal Circuit affirmed an exceptional case fee award against Allcare Health Management for maintaining objectively baseless patent infringement claims, applying the then-prevailing two-part test for § 285 fee awards and addressing the standard of review for exceptional case determinations — a ruling that set the stage for the Supreme Court’s 2014 Octane Fitness decision.
The Federal Circuit reversed a finding of indefiniteness in a touchscreen patent dispute, holding that a claim term need not be expressed in traditional means-plus-function form to invoke § 112(f) — and clarified when functional claim language triggers the algorithm-disclosure requirement, with significant implications for computer and touch interface patent litigation.
The Supreme Court held that the Bayh-Dole Act does not automatically transfer title to federally funded inventions to universities; a researcher’s prior contractual assignment to a private company defeated Stanford’s patent claim.
The Supreme Court held that induced patent infringement requires knowledge of the patent, and that the willful blindness doctrine — deliberately avoiding confirmation of a high-probability fact — satisfies that knowledge requirement.
The Federal Circuit sitting en banc overhauled the doctrine of inequitable conduct, holding that rendering a patent unenforceable requires both but-for materiality (the undisclosed information would have blocked the patent) and specific intent to deceive the USPTO — dramatically narrowing a defense that had become a routine litigation tactic.
The Federal Circuit addressed joint infringement in a healthcare IT patent dispute, holding that when patients and healthcare providers together perform steps of a patented method for online patient-provider communications, neither party alone is a direct infringer — applying the direction-or-control standard for divided infringement to electronic health record systems.
The Federal Circuit ruled that the widely used ’25 percent rule of thumb’ for calculating starting-point patent royalties is inadmissible as a matter of law, vacating a $388 million damages award against Microsoft and requiring that every patent royalty calculation be tied to the specific facts of the case.
The Federal Circuit reversed a summary judgment of obviousness in a deepwater drilling rig patent dispute, holding that the district court failed to give adequate weight to powerful objective evidence of non-obviousness — including commercial success, long-felt need, and failure of others — and remanded for proper analysis of the full record.
The Federal Circuit applied claim differentiation and rejected a narrowing construction of defibrillator patent claims, holding that independent claims cannot be read to require limitations found only in dependent claims — and affirmed the district court’s infringement finding on the broader interpretation.
The Federal Circuit held AstraZeneca’s patents on a once-daily budesonide inhaler formulation (Pulmicort Respules) valid and infringed in a Hatch-Waxman challenge, affirming the district court’s analysis of the complex obviousness record and reinforcing the significance of FDA-required labeling disclosures in constructive notice and § 101 analysis for pharmaceutical patents.
The Federal Circuit affirmed an ITC exclusion order barring importation of GPS chip products that infringed Broadcom’s GPS patents, holding that the claimed methods were patent-eligible under the machine-or-transformation test and rejecting a divided-infringement defense based on user interaction.
The Federal Circuit sitting en banc held that 35 U.S.C. § 112 contains a written description requirement that is distinct from the enablement requirement, and invalidated a broad genus patent covering all substances that inhibit NF-κB activity because the patent described the goal but not the means.
The Federal Circuit affirmed a $200 million jury verdict and permanent injunction against Microsoft for infringing i4i’s patent on a method for editing custom XML in word processing documents, rejecting Microsoft’s invalidity defense premised on a prior-sold product and upholding the clear-and-convincing evidence standard for patent invalidity claims.
The Federal Circuit vacated a patent damages award and held that a reasonable royalty calculation must rely on licenses that are technologically and economically comparable to the patent at issue — rejecting a royalty rate derived from re-bundling agreements that had no connection to the claimed invention.
The Federal Circuit affirmed summary judgment of invalidity of a patent on a method for bulk email delivery, holding the claims obvious under post-KSR standards where the claimed process involved only routine, predictable steps well within the common sense of a person with ordinary skill in email marketing.
The Federal Circuit largely affirmed that Roche’s pegylated erythropoietin product Mircera infringed four of Amgen’s EPO patents, but vacated the district court’s double-patenting rulings and remanded for additional analysis — a significant ruling in the long-running battle over the blockbuster anemia-treatment drug market.
The Federal Circuit vacated a $1.5 billion patent damages award against Microsoft, holding that the jury’s royalty base improperly relied on the entire market value of Microsoft’s products — including features unrelated to the patented invention — without proof that the patented feature drove demand for the whole product.
The Federal Circuit en banc held that the traditional four-factor preliminary injunction test applies in Hatch-Waxman patent cases — eliminating the prior practice under which a showing of validity and infringement created a presumption of irreparable harm — and remanded the preliminary injunction against generic clarithromycin for reconsideration under the corrected standard.
The Federal Circuit addressed the joint infringement problem in method patent claims — holding that when multiple parties each perform different steps of a claimed method, infringement requires that one party direct or control the actions of the other parties performing the remaining steps, setting an important standard for software and service patents with distributed functionality.
The Federal Circuit held that a patent application claiming an isolated DNA sequence encoding the NAIL protein receptor was obvious under KSR — where the prior art disclosed both the protein and routine methods of cloning its encoding gene — marking an important application of KSR’s flexible obviousness standard to biotechnology patent claims for genetic sequences.
The Federal Circuit struck down a controversial USPTO rule that would have limited patent applicants’ right to file continuation applications claiming priority to parent patents, holding the rule was inconsistent with 35 U.S.C. § 120 — while upholding other procedural rules in the contested rulemaking package.
The Federal Circuit affirmed the validity of Sanofi’s Plavix (clopidogrel) patent, holding that prior disclosure of a racemic mixture does not anticipate a claim to an isolated single enantiomer — particularly when the enantiomer exhibits unexpectedly superior properties not predictable from the racemate.
The Federal Circuit held that the ITC’s limited exclusion order authority under Section 337 does not extend to downstream products of non-parties to the investigation — rejecting the ITC’s longstanding practice of excluding finished goods containing infringing components made by respondents, and limiting such broad relief to general exclusion orders.
The Federal Circuit held that direct infringement of a method claim divided across multiple parties requires that a single defendant direct or control the performance of every claimed step — a ruling that made it significantly harder to prove infringement of internet-era method patents implemented through multi-party systems.
The Supreme Court held that the doctrine of patent exhaustion applies to method patents and that an authorized sale of a product that substantially embodies a patented method exhausts the patent holder’s rights — foreclosing downstream infringement suits against purchasers.
The Federal Circuit vacated a $78.9 million willful infringement verdict against DirecTV’s satellite broadcasting system, reversing on claim construction and holding that means-plus-function claims for software functions require more than a bare reference to software — the specification must disclose the specific algorithm performing each claimed function.