Precedential and Key Federal Circuit Opinions
1. U.S. PATENT NO. 7,679,637 LLC v. GOOGLE LLC [OPINION] (2024‑1520, 01/22/2026) (Moore, Hughes, Stoll)
Moore, C.J. The Court affirmed the district court’s dismissal of U.S. Patent No. 7,679,637 LLC’s complaint for failure to state a claim, holding that the asserted claims of the patent are patent‑ineligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The patent at issue relates to web conferencing systems that include “time-shifting capabilities,” meaning that they purportedly “allow data streams (e.g., video, chat data, documents, web pages, and white-boarding sessions) to be viewed asynchronously.” The district court concluded that the claims are directed to an abstract idea and lack an inventive concept, and it denied leave to amend the complaint as futile.
On appeal, the Court analyzed the claims under the Alice two‑step framework. At step one, Plaintiff argued that the district court overgeneralized the scope of the asserted claims and argued that the claims were directed to a “specific asserted improvement that allows a presentation to be reviewed asynchronously . . . at the same time.” The Court rejected the patentee’s argument and found that “the claims are result-oriented because they do not explain how the client applications achieve the recited manipulation of the data streams to enable [the alleged goal of] asynchronous review.” At step two, the Court noted that the patentee largely repeated the already-rejected arguments for step one, and found that the specification characterizes the patentee’s purported inventive concepts as conventional technology.
2. SOUND VIEW INNOVATIONS, LLC v. HULU, LLC [OPINION] (2024‑1092, 01/29/2026) (Prost, Wallach, Chen)
Chen, J. The Court affirmed the district court’s grant of summary judgment of noninfringement in favor of Hulu. The asserted method claim 16 of U.S. Patent No. 6,708,213 purportedly relates to reducing latency in streaming media networks using helper servers and buffers. The district court held that Hulu did not infringe because its systems did not perform the claimed steps in the required sequence and because they lacked the claimed buffer. In making its finding, the district court relied on its construction of the term “buffer” to require a specialized (not generic) buffer, and its construction that the first limitation of the claim must be performed before the second.
On appeal, the Court addressed both grounds for summary judgment. With respect to whether accused products met the “buffer” limitation, the Court disagreed with the district court’s construction that claim 16 requires a specialized buffer associated with a single streaming media object, because it found that nothing in the specification suggested such an interpretation. Nonetheless, with respect to the ordering of the claimed steps, the Court held that the claim does require a specific order because “both the grammar and logic of claim 16 require the first limitation [“receiving a request for an SM object”] to be performed before the second [“allocating a buffer . . . to cache . . . said requested SM object”].” In doing so, the Court disagreed with the patentee’s characterization of implicit ordering caselaw, noting that it “does not require a finding that the performance of the claimed steps would be inoperable if the steps are not followed in the order they appear in the claim.” Likewise, the Court rejected patentee’s reliance on a figure from the patent where it did not provide the necessary information that maps onto the relevant portions of claim.
Because it was undisputed that Hulu’s systems did not perform the claimed steps in the required order, the Court affirmed summary judgment of noninfringement.
3. BARRY v. DEPUY SYNTHES COMPANIES [OPINION] (2023‑2226 and 2023‑2234, 01/20/2026) (Prost, Taranto, Stark)
Stark, J. The Court reversed the district court’s grant of judgment as a matter of law in favor of DePuy, and remanded the case for a new trial. The patents at issue relate to surgical tools and techniques for treating spinal deformities. After excluding both of Barry’s experts under Federal Rule of Evidence 702, the district court concluded that Barry could not prove infringement and granted JMOL for DePuy.
On appeal, the Court analyzed whether the district court properly exercised its gatekeeping role under Rule 702. With respect to the technical expert, Dr. Barry, the Court held that the expert did not explicitly contradict the court’s claim construction of “handle means,” but instead applied that construction to the accused devices in a manner that “a reasonable factfinder could have either accepted as persuasive or rejected as implausible.” Holding that this was an issue of credibility reserved for the jury, the Court noted that “an effective cross-examination will almost always reveal the type of tensions and ambiguities the Dissent characterizes, wrongly in our view, as contradictions.” As to the survey expert, Dr. Neal, the Court held that alleged flaws in sampling and survey design were not sufficient to warrant exclusion. The Court also pointed out that the “district court failed to cite any actual evidence, either particularized or introduced at trial, to support its conclusion that the flaws it found in Neal’s survey, methods, and opinions render his testimony unhelpful to the trier of fact under Rule 702(a) or inadmissible under Rule 104(a),” and relied solely on Dr. Neal’s trial testimony. Ultimately, the Court held that, because the district court abused its discretion and reversed the exclusion rulings and remanded for a new trial at which both experts may testify.
In a dissenting opinion, Judge Prost wrote in favor of the district court’s judgment, noting that the majority did not apply the proper standard in reviewing the district court’s opinion and ignored key precedent. As to Dr. Barry’s technical opinion, Judge Prost agreed with the district court that his opinions clearly contradicted the district court’s claim construction and that the majority “ask[ed] the wrong questions and focuse[d] on the wrong actor. By asking whether a reasonable jury could have ‘accepted’ Dr. Yassir’s testimony as persuasive, the majority effectively applie[d] a JMOL standard, not an admissibility one.” As to Dr. Neal’s survey opinion, Judge Prost disagreed with the majority that flaws in the expert’s methodology were questions of “weight,” an opinion which “seriously undermines district courts’ abilities to carry out their important gatekeeping responsibility.”
4. RANGE OF MOTION PRODUCTS, LLC v. ARMAID COMPANY INC. [OPINION] (2023‑2427, 02/02/2026) (Moore, C.J., Hughes, Cunningham)
Cunningham, J. The Court affirmed the district court’s grant of summary judgment of noninfringement of U.S. Design Patent No. D802,155, which claims the ornamental design of a body massaging apparatus. The district court held that the asserted design patent has a narrow scope because many of its features are functional, and that no reasonable jury could find Armaid’s accused “Armaid2” device substantially similar to the claimed design.
On appeal, the Court first addressed claim construction, rejecting the patentee’s argument that the district court improperly eliminated entire structural elements from the claimed design by classifying the “shape” of the arms as functional. The Court agreed that the shape of the device’s arms and certain base features are driven by function and therefore must be factored out of the infringement analysis, even though they may possess some ornamental aspects. The Court further rejected the patentee’s argument that “D’155 patent drawings unambiguously show that the shape of the arms is ornamental” and “therefore the district court did not err by consulting the extrinsic evidence.”
Applying the ordinary observer test, the Court concluded that, after accounting for functional aspects, the overall ornamental appearance of the accused Armaid2 device is plainly dissimilar from the claimed design as a matter of law. Although the designs share a broad conceptual similarity, differences in proportions, segmentation, and overall visual impression would be apparent to an ordinary observer familiar with the prior art. Accordingly, the Court affirmed summary judgment of noninfringement.
Chief Judge Moore dissented, noting that “[i]t is hard to imagine, looking at the two overall designs, that no reasonable purchaser of handheld massagers could ever find that the overall designs were substantially similar.” Judge Moore explained that the reason for the majority’s differing opinion is due to an incorrect shift in frame of reference for the substantial similarity test “from whether two designs are substantially similar in overall appearance to whether two designs are ‘sufficiently distinct’ or ‘plainly dissimilar.’”
