Posts in Federal Circuit

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential decision on Thursday holding that the principles of prosecution history disclaimer apply to design patents, thus reversing a jury verdict that had found Top Brand LLC had infringed Cozy Comfort Company LLC’s trademarks and design patent. Cozy Comfort and Top Brand both manufacture “oversized hooded sweatshirts.” Cozy comfort owns U.S. Design Patent No. D859,788 (the “D788 patent”) and two trademarks for “THE COMFY” for goods and services relating to blanket throws. After Top Brand sought declaratory judgment of non-infringement from the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona, Cozy Comfort counterclaimed for infringement of the patent and trademarks. A jury ultimately found Top Brand had infringed and the district court denied Top Brand’s motion for judgment as a matter of law (JMOL). 

Several amici have weighed in this week on a petition challenging the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO’s) recission of former USPTO Director Kathi Vidal’s guidance on discretionary denial—and retroactive application of the new, interim guidance—which SAP America, Inc. argues violated its right to due process. SAP filed a petition for a writ of mandamus with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) in June seeking to compel the USPTO “to apply its June 21, 2022, ‘binding agency guidance’ to SAP’s petitions, and all still-active petitions filed before February 28, 2025, and to not pressure SAP or any IPR petitioner into forfeiting in parallel district court litigation an invalidity ground it could not have reasonably asserted in their IPR petition.”

On Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a precedential decision in Shockwave Medical, Inc. v. Cardiovascular Systems, Inc. dismissing cardiovascular health company Shockwave Medical’s appeal arguing that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) erroneously relied on applicant admitted prior art (AAPA) in finding its patent claims obvious. The Federal Circuit found the PTAB’s ruling consistent with its own case law on AAPA, which provided general background knowledge for a person of ordinary skill in the art without serving as the sole basis for the PTAB’s obviousness finding.

The Federal Circuit has held in Symbol Techs. v. Lemelson Med. that the equitable doctrine of laches could be applied to bar enforcement of a patent that issued after applicant’s unreasonable and unexplained delay in prosecution. However, later Supreme Court decisions in Petrella v. Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Inc. and SCA Hygiene Prod. Aktiebolag v. First Quality Baby Prod., LLC render Symbol no longer viable.

Samsung today lost its bid at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) to transfer a suit brought against it by Mullen Industries LLC from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas  to the Northern District of California.

Mullen sued Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (SEC) and Samsung Electronics America, Inc.  (SEA) in Judge Rodney Gilstrap’s Texas court for infringement of its patents through Samsung smartphones, tablets, and watches, including Google Maps and Wear OS functionalities, both of which were developed by Google. Samsung moved to transfer the case to the Northern District of California (NDCA) based mostly on Google’s presence there, and the district court denied the motion.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Tuesday in a precedential decision authored by Judge Taranto affirmed a New Jersey district court’s ruling that Teva Pharmaceuticals USA did not prove the asserted claims of Janssen Pharmaceuticals’ patent for dosing regimens of antipsychotic medications invalid for obviousness.

On July 7, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) affirmed a judgment of noninfringement in favor of Cisco Systems, Inc. in a patent infringement suit brought by Egenera, Inc. The court upheld the Massachusetts district court’s grant of summary judgment on two claims and a jury verdict on two others, concluding that Egenera failed to prove infringement of U.S. Patent No. 7,231,430 by Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS).

On Thursday, July 10, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit will hear oral arguments in Google v. Sonos (No. 24-1097). Front and center in this appeal is the issue of prosecution laches. Sonos’ brief frames the question in this way: “Whether the district court erred in applying prosecution laches to declare the ‘885 and ‘966 patents unenforceable, based on nothing but standard continuation practice that did not extend the patents’ terms.”

On Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential ruling in Eye Therapies, LLC v. Slayback Pharma, LLC, vacating an obviousness ruling by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that invalidated Eye Therapies’ patent claims to methods of treating eye redness. Reviewing the relevant patent prosecution history at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the Federal Circuit found that the Board’s validity ruling was ultimately infected by an erroneous construction of the transitional phrase “consisting essentially of” in light of intrinsic evidence supporting a narrow interpretation for that disputed claim term.

Last week, fiberglass pool design company North Star Technology filed a combined petition  for panel rehearing and rehearing en banc at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to challenge that court’s decision this April affirming the Eastern District of Tennessee’s grant of summary judgment of noninfringement in a design patent case against Latham Pool Products. North Star’s petition argues that the appellate panel employed a “sufficiently distinct” test for infringement that lacks objective guardrails, inappropriate for the summary judgment posture of the appeal and similar to other areas of design patent law recently realigned with the utility patent context by the Federal Circuit.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) today affirmed a district court’s grant of a motion for judgment on the pleadings that a patent to facilitate interoperability between multimedia systems was directed to an ineligible abstract idea. District Judge Mark Scarsi of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, sitting by designation, authored the opinion.

The U.S. Supreme Court today invited the Solicitor General of the United States to weigh in on whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) was correct in reversing a district court’s grant of Hikma Pharmaceuticals’ motion to dismiss Amarin Pharma, Inc.’s complaint against it for induced infringement last June.

On Wednesday, predictive analytics firm Recentive filed a combined petition  for panel rehearing and rehearing en banc with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit challenging that court’s invalidation of Recentive’s machine learning patent claims this April. As Recentive argues, the Federal Circuit’s decision to eliminate all patent protection for novel machine learning applications using established models conflicts with the U.S. Supreme Court’s patent-eligibility standard under 35 U.S.C. § 101 and chills U.S. innovation an incredibly important area of emerging technology.

On Wednesday, June 18, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued an opinion affirming in part and vacating in part the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s (PTAB) decision regarding Avago Technologies’ U.S. Patent No. 8,646,014. The patent, titled “Multistream Video Communication With Staggered Access Points,” addresses methods for reducing latency in video streaming systems. Specifically, it enables a video receiver to select from multiple streams the one expected to minimize latency, defined as the delay from a user’s request for content to its playback.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential decision today holding that it does not have jurisdiction to review appeals outside of final decisions on the merits from the International Trade Commission (ITC) that affect the entry of articles…. Realtek appealed the ITC’s denial of its motion for sanctions against Future Link, arguing that both the ITC ALJ and the Commission itself violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) by rejecting the sanctions request. The ITC and Future Link argued that the CAFC did not have jurisdiction to hear the appeal and that Realtek did not have standing.