Opinions — Wednesday, March 11, 2026

Immervision, Inc. v. Apple Inc., No. 2024-2220, an appeal from a Patent Trial and Appeal Board decision in IPR2023-00472, was dismissed by stipulation of the parties under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 42(b), with each side to bear their own costs.

The Federal Circuit vacated the Eastern District of Virginia's judgment that Gen Digital Inc. (Norton) infringed U.S. Patent Nos. 8,601,322 and 8,074,115, held by The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York, after a jury awarded Columbia $185,112,727 in damages and the district court added enhanced damages and attorneys' fees. The court held that the asserted claims—directed to methods, systems, and computer-readable media for detecting anomalous program executions by executing a program in an emulator and comparing function calls to a model created from multiple computers—are directed to an abstract idea at step one of Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International. Reversing the district court's denial of Norton's motion for judgment on the pleadings under 35 U.S.C. § 101, the Federal Circuit concluded that the claims merely apply the abstract idea of divide-and-conquer computing to the conventional technology of virus scanning, and that Columbia's arguments regarding purported technological improvements—such as selective emulation—either were not preserved or were unsupported by the claim language itself. The court remanded for the district court to address step two of Alice (whether the claims contain an inventive concept) in the first instance, and also held that the district court erred in awarding damages for Norton's foreign sales and that the enhanced damages and attorneys' fees awards must be vacated in light of the reversal of a contempt finding against Norton's counsel in a companion case.

The decision underscores the Federal Circuit's insistence that patent eligibility analysis at Alice step one must focus on what the claims themselves require, not on unclaimed features described in the specification. The court rejected Columbia's attempt to characterize the claims as directed to selective emulation and other technological improvements where the claim language permitted operation without those features, reinforcing that "only features that are claimed, not unclaimed details that appear in the specification, can supply something beyond an abstract idea." The ruling demonstrates that efficiency gains from conventional distributed computing—even in the specialized context of virus scanning—do not alone render claims patent-eligible where the underlying method is a well-known abstract process. The court's conditional treatment of additional issues (claim construction, infringement, willfulness, and damages for foreign sales) provides guidance for the remand proceedings while preserving judicial economy, signaling that practitioners defending software patents must ensure that any asserted technological improvement is expressly required by claim language rather than merely disclosed as an optional embodiment in the specification.

The Federal Circuit reversed the Southern District of Iowa's judgment that claim 12 of U.S. Patent No. 6,202,395—held by Richard Gramm and exclusively licensed to Reaper Solutions LLC—is invalid as indefinite under 35 U.S.C. § 112(b). The district court had concluded that the means-plus-function term "control means" required disclosure of an algorithm because the corresponding structure disclosed in the specification—certain Dial-A-Matic header controller versions used in Deere combines—incorporated microprocessors. The Federal Circuit held that the district court erred by excluding from its corresponding-structure analysis Deere's Dial-A-Matic Version #1 controller, which Deere conceded controlled header height through logic circuitry (diodes, switches, and integrated circuits) rather than a microprocessor. The district court improperly restricted corresponding structure to only those controllers capable of performing an additional, unclaimed function—controlling the lateral position of the header—despite the claimed function being limited to "raising or lowering the header . . . a designated height above the soil."

The decision reinforces the principle that corresponding structure for a means-plus-function limitation must be identified solely by reference to the recited function, and cannot be restricted based on additional capabilities disclosed in the specification but not claimed. The court applied Wenger Manufacturing, Inc. v. Coating Machinery Systems, Inc. and Golight, Inc. v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. to reverse the district court's importation of unclaimed functional requirements into the structure analysis. Critically, the panel clarified that because Dial-A-Matic Version #1 uses logic circuitry rather than a general-purpose computer or microprocessor, it does not trigger the algorithm disclosure requirement established in WMS Gaming, Inc. v. International Game Technology—meaning the specification's failure to disclose an algorithm cannot render the claim indefinite. The holding has immediate significance for means-plus-function claiming strategies where specifications reference commercially available embodiments with varying capabilities, particularly in distinguishing when the algorithm requirement applies based on whether disclosed structure relies on programmable processing or fixed logic circuitry.