SCOTUS Declines Case on Right of Patent Owners to Identify RPIs

The U.S. Supreme Court today denied a petition for certiorari in Dolby Laboratories Licensing Corporation v. Unified Patents LLC, a case that asked the High Court to consider whether patent owners have a right to require Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) petitioners to identify all real parties in interest (RPIs) in inter partes review (IPR) proceedings.

The petition stems from a precedential June 2025 U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) decision dismissing Dolby Labs’ appeal from the PTAB for lack of an injury-in-fact to confer Article III standing. The Federal Circuit held that, although patent owners might have the right to dispute unnamed RPIs during IPR proceedings, the America Invents Act (AIA) does not give patent owners a freestanding right to identify RPIs.

During IPR proceedings challenging the validity of Dolby Labs’ patent claims to a prediction method for video decoding, which Dolby ultimately won, Dolby alleged that there were nine RPIs that were unnamed by petitioner Unified Patents. The issue wasn’t adjudicated by the PTAB when it instituted the IPR. It was also largely avoided in the PTAB’s final written decision, which explained that RPI determinations were unnecessary in this case as there was no evidence that any alleged RPI was time-barred or estopped under 35 U.S.C. § 315, or that Unified purposefully omitted RPIs from the petition to gain any advantage.

Dolby appealed to the Supreme Court in February of 2026, arguing in its petition for cert that the CAFC’s decision the “gutted the protections Congress guaranteed patent owners under § 312(a)(2).” It accused the CAFC of erecting “artificial barriers that are inconsistent with the statute’s text, structure, and history” and said that, under Supreme Court precedents, “a showing that ‘the alleged information deficit hindered’ the plaintiff’s ability to use that information suffices to establish injury in fact,” citing TransUnion v. Ramirez, 594 U.S. 413, 442 (2021).

But the U.S. government filed a Brief for the Federal Respondent in Opposition urging the Justices to deny the petition for several reasons. Significantly, the USPTO returned to its original interpretation of 35 U.S.C. 312(a)(2) in late 2025, which “has also greatly reduced the practical significance of petitioner’s claims,” said the brief.

In October 2025, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director John Squires sent a memo to all administrative patent judges (APJs) at the PTAB informing them that the agency was restoring the practice of requiring petitioners before the PTAB to identify all RPIs prior to institution. The change was intended to address the exploitation of PTAB proceedings by foreign state-backed actors arising as an unintended consequence of less stringent RPI standards enforced by previous administrations.

Squires told PTAB APJs that he was restoring RPI identification requirements that existed prior to the Board’s 2020 decision in SharkNinja Operating LLC v. iRobot Corp., in which an RPI analysis wasn’t required for institution unless time-bar or estoppel issues were implicated by an RPI claimed by the patent owner. After removing the precedential designation from SharkNinja in late September, Director Squires’ memo announced that the RPI identification requirement would be restored by designating Corning Optical Communications RF, LLC v. PPC Broadband, Inc. (2015) as precedential.

In Dolby’s case, however, the CAFC correctly determined that Dolby, “as the prevailing party before the Board, had ‘failed to meet its burden’ to establish Article III standing to appeal the Board’s final written decision upholding petitioner’s patent.” This would therefore be a poor vehicle to address the issue, said the government.

The Alliance of U.S. Startups & Inventors for Jobs (USIJ) filed a brief supporting Dolby’s petition and argued that “there is no question that the patent owner here is entitled to an identification of other entities, in addition to the surrogate petitioner Unified Patents, that are estopped from challenging the validity of its patent.”

The amicus brief also warned the Court that a denial of the petition would be “an open invitation for any entity that acts routinely as a surrogate petitioner for others simply to ignore the requirements of Sections 312 and 315.”

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