Opinions — Friday, February 13, 2026

The Fourth Circuit vacated a district court's sua sponte dismissal of a complaint under Rule 12(b)(6) and remanded for further proceedings in this action by nine professional models against Acuarius Night Club LLC. Plaintiffs alleged violations of Lanham Act § 43(a)(1) and state law claims, including misappropriation of likeness, based on allegations that the nightclub misappropriated their images from social media to promote club events without authorization, falsely suggesting they were employees or endorsed the club. When plaintiffs failed to respond to defendant's motion to dismiss within the 14-day local rule period, the district court issued a text order "granting as unopposed Defendant's motion to dismiss," dismissing eight counts with prejudice and declining to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over the sole state-law claim (Count III for misappropriation of likeness) that defendant had conceded was adequately pleaded. The Fourth Circuit held that Rule 12(b)(6) does not authorize default relief for failure to respond to a motion to dismiss, and that a court must independently determine whether the complaint states a plausible claim for relief even when the motion is unopposed.

The decision establishes that a nonresponse to a Rule 12(b)(6) motion cannot serve as an automatic procedural default warranting dismissal. The court distinguished Rule 12(b)(6) from other procedural rules that expressly provide for default consequences (such as Rules 4(a)(1)(E), 8(b)(6), 12(h)(1), 36(a)(3), and 38(d)), emphasizing that dismissal under Rule 12(b)(6) may be granted only if the complaint on its face fails to state a plausible claim upon which relief can be granted, not as a sanction for procedural failure. While the court may treat the bases for dismissal in an unopposed motion as "uncontroverted," it remains obligated to conduct the Iqbal/Twombly inquiry into facial sufficiency. The Fourth Circuit rejected defendant's reliance on the First Circuit's Pomerleau decision, which had permitted dismissal of unopposed motions where a local rule expressly requires a response, noting that the District of South Carolina has no such local rule. The court also rejected defendant's preservation argument, holding that plaintiffs were not required to raise their Stevenson argument in a post-judgment motion because the error occurred when the district court entered judgment, and a timely appeal sufficed to preserve the issue.

The Federal Circuit affirmed the district court's judgment that Vicor Corporation indirectly and willfully infringed claims 55 and 67 of SynQor, Inc.'s U.S. Patent No. 7,564,702, which relates to DC-DC power converters with intermediate bus architecture, and upheld awards of enhanced damages and attorneys' fees totaling approximately $25 million. Vicor challenged the sufficiency of the evidence supporting the jury's findings of indirect infringement under a willful blindness theory and willfulness, as well as the district court's post-trial awards.

The court applied the two-prong Global-Tech test for willful blindness—requiring proof that the defendant subjectively believed there was a high probability of infringement and took deliberate actions to avoid learning that fact—and emphasized the highly fact-intensive nature of the intent inquiry. Reviewing under Fifth Circuit law using a substantial evidence standard, the court refused to reweigh evidence and sustained the verdict based on Vicor's knowledge of the prior Artesyn litigation (which found SynQor's patents infringed), its reverse engineering of SynQor's patent-marked products, its decision to indemnify customers rather than obtain a noninfringement opinion, and testimony that Vicor's CEO deliberately avoided reading the patent despite understanding infringement analysis required claim comparison. The court also rejected Vicor's argument that willful blindness requires affirmative acts rather than strategic omissions, holding that a deliberate failure to read the patent while on notice of infringement risk satisfies Global-Tech's deliberate-action requirement.

The Federal Circuit reversed the Patent Trial and Appeal Board's final written decision upholding all claims of DivX, LLC's U.S. Patent No. 10,225,588 in inter partes review and remanded for further proceedings. Netflix, Inc. had challenged the patent's claims, directed to streaming partially encrypted media content, as obvious over Chen in view of Lindahl and Hurst. The Board majority adopted DivX's construction of claim limitation [l], requiring that "encryption information" identifying encrypted video portions be located "within the requested portions of the selected stream of protected video," and on that basis found Netflix had not proven obviousness. Applying de novo review to the claim construction dispute, the court held that under the last antecedent rule—a grammatical principle requiring modifiers to attach presumptively to the nearest reasonable referent—the "within" phrase modifies "encrypted portions of frames of video" rather than "encryption information." The court found nothing in the claim language, specification, or prosecution history sufficient to overcome this presumptive meaning, noting the specification expressly contemplated embodiments using conventional Matroska containers and top-level index files where encryption information could not be located within the requested stream portions. One Board member had dissented, agreeing with Netflix's construction.

This decision reinforces the Federal Circuit's willingness to apply canons of grammatical interpretation as threshold interpretive tools in claim construction, even when specification embodiments might support a narrower reading. The court's reliance on the last antecedent rule as a "default principle" that requires affirmative textual signals or specification-based lexicography to overcome establishes a methodological framework that may constrain patentees' ability to secure constructions tied to preferred embodiments when claim language is susceptible to broader ordinary meaning under established grammatical precepts. The decision also illustrates the court's treatment of specification disclosure of alternative embodiments—here, conventional Matroska containers and top-level index files—as sufficient to prevent limiting claims to the location constraints present in other described embodiments, even without detailed elaboration of those alternatives.

The Federal Circuit vacated and remanded the Patent Trial and Appeal Board's decision in an inter partes review of U.S. Patent No. 10,869,169, owned by Wildseed Mobile, LLC. The Board had found claims 1–14 and 16–22 unpatentable as obvious but upheld claim 15, a dependent claim reciting two disjunctive limitations: generating a hot link message as either an SMS message or an IM message. Google challenged the Board's determination as to claim 15, arguing the Board failed to address its arguments under the IM limitation.

The court held the Board violated the Administrative Procedure Act by failing to articulate its reasoning regarding the IM limitation of claim 15. Although the Board thoroughly analyzed whether the prior art taught the SMS limitation, it made no mention of the IM limitation—even omitting it when quoting the claim—and provided no explanation for why Google failed to prove unpatentability under that disjunctive alternative. The court could not discern from the record whether the Board found the IM limitation not taught by the prior art, whether Google had waived or abandoned an IM-based ground, or whether some other rationale supported the decision. The court declined to speculate about possible reasons, including Wildseed's argument that Google had limited its HTML argument to email only, emphasizing that the Board must document its reasoning with sufficient particularity to permit meaningful appellate review.

The Federal Circuit affirmed the Northern District of California's ruling that the USPTO Director was not required to conduct notice-and-comment rulemaking under 5 U.S.C. § 553 before issuing instructions to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board regarding discretionary denial of inter partes review (IPR) institution in cases involving parallel district court litigation. Apple Inc. and four other companies challenged the Director's NHK and Fintiv precedential decisions, which established factors for the Board to consider when exercising the Director's delegated discretion not to institute IPR proceedings. This appeal followed the court's 2023 decision in Apple Inc. v. Vidal, which held that while challenges to the instructions as contrary to 35 U.S.C. chapter 31 or arbitrary and capricious were unreviewable, the procedural challenge under the APA's rulemaking requirements was justiciable. The district court concluded the instructions constituted a "general statement of policy" exempt from § 553(b)'s notice-and-comment requirements rather than a substantive or legislative rule, and the Federal Circuit agreed, emphasizing that Congress provided no legal right to IPR institution, the instructions bound only the Board and not the Director himself, and the Director retained unreviewable discretion to reverse Board institution decisions or decide personally.

The decision clarifies the boundary between policy statements and legislative rules in the context of agency instructions governing discretionary authority that Congress has made unreviewable. The court rejected Apple's argument that its 2023 standing holding necessarily determined that the instructions were legislative rules, explaining that finding injury to a legally protected interest for Article III purposes does not establish that a measure "alter[s] the landscape of individual rights and obligations, binding parties with the force and effect of law" under Stupp Corp. v. United States. The court also held that 35 U.S.C. § 316's directive that the Director "prescribe regulations" does not itself mandate notice-and-comment procedures, as the term "regulation" encompasses both substantive rules and interpretative rules or policy statements exempt under 5 U.S.C. § 553(b). The decision has implications for how agencies may structure internal guidance to adjudicative bodies exercising delegated discretion, particularly when the underlying statutory authority is committed to agency discretion by law and shielded from judicial review, and provides guidance on the interaction between Article III standing requirements and the merits of APA procedural challenges.

In Densys Ltd. v. 3Shape Trios A/S, the Federal Circuit granted appellee Densys Ltd.'s motion to dismiss defendants-appellants 3Shape Trios A/S and 3Shape A/S's appeal for lack of jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1295(a)(1), finding that no final decision had been entered where the district court had not yet resolved pre- and post-judgment interest or entered final judgment following the jury's April 2022 verdict. The court dismissed the appeal subject to reinstatement under the same docket number without payment of an additional filing fee if 3Shape appeals from entry of a final, appealable decision within 60 days, and ordered each side to bear its own costs.

The Federal Circuit granted the Director of the USPTO's unopposed motion to remand In re Datonics, LLC, in which Datonics appealed a Patent Trial and Appeal Board decision rejecting patent application claims on double patenting and patent eligibility grounds. The Director acknowledged error in the Board's analysis and sought remand for further proceedings, which the court granted without reaching the merits in order to preserve party and judicial resources.

The court's order reflects the Director's authority to confess error and seek remand in ex parte appeals from the Board, a procedural mechanism that allows the agency to correct its own mistakes without full appellate briefing and decision. The court applied its discretion to remand based on judicial economy considerations, declining to address whether the Board's double patenting or eligibility rejections were substantively flawed. This posture leaves the appellant with a clean slate before the Board but without any appellate guidance on the legal issues that prompted the appeal.