Opinions — Tuesday, January 6, 2026

The Tenth Circuit affirmed summary judgment for SurfaceQuest on Kesters' Lanham Act § 43(a)(1)(B) false advertising claim, holding that Kesters failed to establish injury—whether presumed or actual. Kesters Merchandising Display International alleged that SurfaceQuest misrepresented Kesters' MicroLite lightweight construction material as SurfaceQuest's own product in photographs, videos, and samples shown to customers. The court held that even assuming SurfaceQuest's advertisements were literally false, Kesters could not benefit from a presumed-injury rule because it failed to establish that Kesters and SurfaceQuest were the only significant participants in the relevant market. The court further held that Kesters presented no evidence of actual injury causally connected to the false advertising, noting specifically that Kesters offered no proof that SurfaceQuest won the Hy-Vee health market project Kesters lost, that SurfaceQuest showed its marketing materials to Hy-Vee, or that Hy-Vee ever saw the allegedly deceptive materials.

The decision turns on two evidentiary failures that false advertising practitioners must note. First, the court applied Vitamins Online's two-prong test for presumed injury, requiring proof that the defendant materially inflated its product's value and that plaintiff and defendant are the only significant market participants—a narrow exception the court construed strictly by requiring evidence of cross-elasticity of demand to define the relevant market, not mere product similarity. Kesters' affidavit addressing product similarities failed because reasonable interchangeability depends on substitutability measured by cross-elasticity, not physical resemblance. Second, on actual injury, the court demanded proof of a causal chain linking the false advertising to lost sales, rejecting Kesters' bid-loss theory where no evidence showed the defendant obtained the project, presented the false materials to the customer, or that the customer ever viewed them. The decision underscores that literal falsity alone cannot carry a § 43(a)(1)(B) claim without market-definition evidence supporting a presumption or concrete proof tracing competitive injury to the defendant's deceptive statements.

The Federal Circuit affirmed the district court's determination that claims 1 and 14 of U.S. Patent No. 8,139,652 are invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101 in Technology in Ariscale, LLC v. Razer USA Ltd. The '652 patent claims a computer-implemented method for decoding transmission signals by receiving, deinterleaving, combining, and decoding symbols. Ariscale argued the claims were directed to improving wireless communication technology, specifically reception performance for downlink frame prefix information, but the Federal Circuit found the claims directed to the abstract idea of receiving, manipulating, and decoding data.

The court's analysis demonstrates how specification disclosures can undermine both Alice/Mayo steps when they reveal flexibility not captured by claim limitations. At step one, the court rejected Ariscale's technological improvement argument because the specification's disclosed benefits applied to transmission signals generally, not just to the downlink frame prefix information Ariscale emphasized, and the specification cannot import unclaimed details into the § 101 analysis. At step two, the court found no inventive concept in the claimed order of steps because the specification disclosed that the combining step could occur either before or after deinterleaving with equivalent results, and claim 2 recited the steps in reverse order—effectively acknowledging that the purported inventive ordering was not tied to the patent's advantages.