The Federal Circuit held that the Patent Act requires inventors to be human beings, affirming the USPTO’s rejection of applications that named an artificial intelligence system called DABUS as the sole inventor.
The Federal Circuit affirmed an award of attorneys’ fees under the court’s inherent equitable powers, holding that a patent owner’s voluntary dismissal from one district followed immediately by refiling the same case in a different district constituted bad-faith forum shopping that warranted sanctions.
The Federal Circuit held that Stanford University’s patents on detecting organ transplant rejection via donor cell-free DNA are ineligible under § 101, finding the claims directed to a natural phenomenon measured by conventional techniques.
The Federal Circuit affirmed denial of a preliminary injunction, holding that speculative harms and generalized customer concerns about potential future harm do not constitute the concrete evidence of irreparable injury required to support preliminary patent injunctive relief.
The Federal Circuit held that prior art references containing obvious transcription errors — mistakes that a skilled artisan would immediately recognize as misstatements — cannot be used to establish unpatentability, because the erroneous content does not accurately disclose the state of the art.
The Federal Circuit reversed the TTAB’s cancellation of Coca-Cola’s U.S. registrations for THUMS UP and LIMCA, holding that a petitioner seeking cancellation under Lanham Act § 14(3) must show actual consumer confusion or misrepresentation affecting the U.S. market — competitive injury alone is not enough.
The Federal Circuit vacated a $2.75 billion patent infringement judgment against Cisco, holding that the trial judge was disqualified from hearing the case after discovering his wife owned Cisco stock — placing the stock into a blind trust did not satisfy the federal recusal statute’s divestiture requirement.
The Federal Circuit held that a patent specification adequately supported a negative claim limitation — “absent an immediately preceding loading dose” — through clinical trial data showing efficacy without a loading dose, sustaining Novartis’s fingolimod patent.
The Federal Circuit addressed trade secret misappropriation claims between competing food processing equipment manufacturers — affirming the district court’s finding that Weber had misappropriated Provisur’s trade secrets through improper acquisition and use of confidential technical information about high-speed meat slicing systems, and upholding the damages award and injunction.
The Federal Circuit addressed Teradata’s patent infringement claims against SAP in the context of the broader antitrust and interoperability dispute over enterprise database software, affirming the district court’s rulings on claim construction and damages methodology while the parallel antitrust claims were litigated separately.
The Federal Circuit held that the USPTO Commissioner for Patents could constitutionally exercise the Director’s review authority over PTAB decisions during a vacancy, rejecting Arthrex’s Appointments Clause and Federal Vacancies Reform Act challenges.
The Federal Circuit affirmed a $7 million patent infringement damages verdict against Microsoft, holding that claim construction challenges must be preserved in a party’s opening brief to be raised on appeal, and reversed the denial of prejudgment interest as an abuse of discretion.
The Federal Circuit vacated a PTAB final written decision for failing to resolve conflicting expert testimony about whether a third party qualified as a joint inventor of a prior art reference, holding that the Board cannot deem all witnesses credible when their accounts are mutually contradictory.
The Federal Circuit addressed the methodology for determining FRAND royalty rates for standard-essential patents in a dispute between Apple and Ericsson over cellular connectivity patents, reviewing the district court’s FRAND determination and addressing how courts should calculate per-unit royalty rates for SEPs incorporated into technical standards used in billions of devices.
The Federal Circuit reversed the PTAB’s finding of non-obviousness, holding that generalized industry skepticism about robotic surgery cannot alone overcome a motivation to combine prior art references — the skepticism must target the specific problem addressed by the claimed invention.
The Federal Circuit held that claim terms like “resilient” and “pliable” are not indefinite simply because they admit of varying degrees, reversing the district court’s indefiniteness ruling on a cardiac catheter patent.
The Federal Circuit applied the Supreme Court’s Minerva v. Hologic (2021) narrowed assignor estoppel framework to a medical device patent dispute, clarifying that assignor estoppel bars an inventor-assignee from challenging patent claims whose validity was implicitly warranted at assignment — but does not bar challenges to claim scope expansions made after assignment.
The Federal Circuit reversed a $137 million induced infringement verdict against Roche, holding that induced infringement requires actual knowledge that the induced acts constitute patent infringement, not merely a ‘knew or should have known’ standard.
The Federal Circuit reversed a claim construction that relied on extrinsic expert testimony to impose a specific frequency threshold on the term “input signal,” holding that extrinsic evidence cannot establish a claim scope limit that has no basis in the patent’s intrinsic record.
The Federal Circuit held that in rare circumstances the Patent Trial and Appeal Board may raise grounds of unpatentability sua sponte against proposed substitute claims in a motion to amend IPR proceeding, even when a petitioner has not raised those grounds.
The Federal Circuit held that generic software terms like “code” and “application” can connote sufficient structure to avoid means-plus-function claiming under § 112 ¶ 6, reversing the district court’s construction.
The Federal Circuit reversed the PTAB and held that Qualcomm’s 5G carrier aggregation patent was unpatentable as obvious, rejecting the Board’s motivation-to-combine analysis and addressing Intel’s standing as an Apple component supplier.
The Federal Circuit granted mandamus and transferred patent suits against Volkswagen and Hyundai out of the Western District of Texas, holding that independently-owned dealerships do not constitute the manufacturers’ regular and established places of business for patent venue purposes absent day-to-day control over their operations.
The Federal Circuit held that a patent complainant at the ITC must establish a specific domestic industry article covered by a patent claim with direct evidence — general expert testimony about product operation is insufficient to satisfy the technical prong.
The Federal Circuit affirmed the district court’s finding of obviousness for Janssen’s patents on monthly injectable paliperidone palmitate (Invega Sustenna) for treating schizophrenia — holding that a skilled formulator would have been motivated to combine known long-acting injectable antipsychotic formulation techniques with paliperidone’s known properties to achieve a monthly injectable product.
The Federal Circuit affirmed the PTAB’s award of CRISPR gene-editing patent rights to the Broad Institute over UC Berkeley, holding that UC’s earlier reduction to practice in prokaryotic cells did not establish a continuous conception and reduction to practice in eukaryotic cells — the more commercially significant application — sufficient to defeat Broad’s independent patent claims.
The Federal Circuit held that a USPTO Director decision vacating an ex parte reexamination on IPR estoppel grounds is subject to judicial review under the APA, reversing the district court’s dismissal.
The Federal Circuit struck down the Lanham Act’s prohibition on registering marks that include a living person’s name without their consent as applied to “TRUMP TOO SMALL,” holding it was an unconstitutional restriction on speech critical of public figures — though the Supreme Court later reversed.
The Supreme Court held 6-3 that a copyright owner’s failure to know that a single registration application could not cover both published and unpublished works did not necessarily constitute a ‘knowing’ inaccuracy that voids the registration — allowing courts to overlook good-faith mistakes in copyright registration applications under 17 U.S.C. § 411(b).
The Federal Circuit held that IPR estoppel under 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(1) applies to invalidity grounds a petitioner could have raised in an earlier-decided IPR, even if that IPR and the later-challenged IPR were filed on the same day — closing the simultaneous-petition loophole.
A divided Federal Circuit affirmed that the patents covering Narcan nasal spray’s naloxone formulation were obvious, finding ample motivation to combine prior art formulations despite secondary considerations including FDA need and commercial 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 held that a contractual forum-selection clause requiring all patent disputes to be filed in district court — not the PTAB — barred Sarepta from filing IPR petitions, enforcing private agreements that waive the right to inter partes review.
The Federal Circuit vacated an $85 million jury verdict against Apple, holding that the damages expert failed to apportion the royalty base to account only for the patented features rather than the entire value of the accused LTE-enabled iPhones.
The Federal Circuit affirmed infringement of Caltech’s Wi-Fi error-correction patents but vacated a $1.1 billion damages award against Broadcom and Apple, rejected a novel two-tier royalty model, and clarified that IPR estoppel bars defendants from raising invalidity grounds that reasonably could have been raised in earlier IPR proceedings.
The Federal Circuit affirmed the PTAB’s rejection of Quanergy’s inter partes review challenge to Velodyne’s foundational 3D LiDAR patent, upholding the patent’s validity as Velodyne survived an attempt to invalidate its core autonomous vehicle sensing technology.
The Federal Circuit held that statements in a patent’s own specification acknowledging known prior art — so-called applicant-admitted prior art (AAPA) — cannot serve as the “basis” for an inter partes review petition under § 311(b), which limits IPR to prior art consisting of patents and printed publications.
The Federal Circuit reversed dismissal of Cooperative Entertainment’s patent on a peer-to-peer content delivery network architecture, holding that claims directed to a specific topology of network nodes for distributing large video files can be patent-eligible when the specific network arrangement improves how content is distributed — not merely an abstract idea of sharing data.
The Federal Circuit affirmed a preliminary injunction protecting Masimo’s pulse oximeter algorithm as a trade secret, holding that prior publication of equivalent mathematics in a statistics journal did not make the algorithm generally known to those who could obtain economic value from it in the medical device field.
The Federal Circuit vacated an ITC infringement determination because the patent owner’s expert lacked the specific experience required to qualify as a person of ordinary skill in the art — broad engineering expertise in related fields was not enough.
The Federal Circuit vacated an infringement ruling against Mylan, holding that the patent’s prosecution history and written description limited the claimed PVP concentration in AstraZeneca’s asthma inhaler patent to a precise value rather than a range.
The Federal Circuit affirmed PTAB’s refusal to invalidate Corcept’s mifepristone dosage patent, holding that an IPR petitioner must demonstrate a reasonable expectation of success for the specific dosage claimed — not merely for the drug combination generally.
In a divided decision, the Federal Circuit affirmed that Biogen’s multiple sclerosis drug patent lacked adequate written description because the specification’s single passing reference to a 480 mg/day dose of dimethyl fumarate did not demonstrate the inventors actually possessed that specific therapeutic method.
The Federal Circuit granted mandamus to compel transfer from the Western District of Texas, holding that a district court’s faster time to trial cannot alone outweigh other venue factors that favor transfer.
The Federal Circuit affirmed dismissal of Celgene’s Hatch-Waxman patent suit for improper venue, holding that for ANDA litigation venue purposes, the act of infringement is the submission of the ANDA itself — not the receipt of a notice letter or the state where future generic sales are anticipated.
The Federal Circuit reversed a PTAB obviousness determination, holding that the Board lacked substantial evidence for a reasonable expectation of success because the cited prior art references did not actually achieve the claimed result of inactivating antibiotic-resistant bacteria without photosensitizing agents.
The Federal Circuit addressed the scope of IPR estoppel under § 315(e)(2), holding that an IPR petitioner is estopped from raising in district court invalidity grounds based on prior art that could reasonably have been raised in the IPR petition — including prior art patents and publications the petitioner did not actually rely on in the IPR.
The Federal Circuit held that a cardiac monitoring patent claim directed to filtering T-wave data to distinguish it from atrial fibrillation was an abstract idea of data filtering, lacking an inventive concept sufficient to survive § 101 scrutiny.
The Federal Circuit held that a forum selection clause in a non-disclosure agreement requiring disputes to be litigated in New York courts does not preclude the counterparty from filing inter partes review petitions at the PTAB, because the connection between the IPR and the NDA was too attenuated.
The Federal Circuit reversed a district court’s patent ineligibility ruling, holding that claims directed to a specific two-channel mobile authentication method that improves cybersecurity represent a concrete technical solution eligible for patent protection.