Opinions — Thursday, April 30, 2026

The Federal Circuit affirmed the PTAB's determination that claims 1-7 and 9-14 of Wildseed Mobile's U.S. Patent No. 7,376,414 are unpatentable as obvious. The patent relates to inserting targeted advertisements into broadcast content on mobile devices based on user information. The central dispute concerned construction of the claim term "information taken by the cellular device from a message," with Wildseed arguing it requires verbatim extraction while Google contended it encompasses derived or generated information.

The court's analysis demonstrates how claim construction disputes turn on the interplay between claim language, specification support, and dictionary definitions when no clear lexicography or disclaimer exists. The Board rejected Wildseed's narrowing construction after finding nothing in the intrinsic record limiting "taken" to verbatim extraction, and the Federal Circuit agreed that the claim language merely restricts the source of information (a message) without constraining how that information is processed. The court disposed of Wildseed's claim differentiation argument by explaining that "determined" and "taken" retain distinct meanings under the Board's construction, and rejected the hindsight challenge by crediting expert testimony that 2001-era technology could derive information through database retrieval without requiring modern AI capabilities.

In Kamdem-Ouaffo v. Baker Botts, LLP, the Federal Circuit dismissed the appeal after issuing a show cause order, concluding that appellant's challenge to the district court's denial of his Rule 60(b)(4) motion was clearly frivolous because he failed to make any cogent, non-frivolous argument that the underlying judgment was void under the exacting standard required by that rule. The court declined to reach a definitive conclusion on whether it or the Second Circuit had jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1295(a)(1), finding dismissal appropriate regardless and declining to transfer under 28 U.S.C. § 1631 given the frivolous nature of the appeal, with each side to bear its own costs.