Opinions — Friday, May 22, 2026

The Federal Circuit affirmed the PTAB's determination that all claims of Pictometry International Corporation's U.S. Patent No. 10,648,800—directed to a method for measuring roofs using aerial imagery—were unpatentable for obviousness over the combination of prior art references Pershing and Abhyanker. Pictometry argued on appeal that Abhyanker's marker-locking feature failed to teach the claimed "user-acceptance" limitation because it was available to the user before (rather than "responsive to") the user's designation of the roof location, as allegedly required by the claim language.

The court declined to resolve the claim construction dispute definitively but noted substantial obstacles to Pictometry's temporal interpretation, including that the patent's primary embodiments in Figures 4A–4D show the "confirm selection" option displayed on screen before the user even enters address information. The court held that even assuming Pictometry's narrower construction, substantial evidence supported the Board's finding that a person of ordinary skill would understand from Abhyanker—either directly or through sufficiently motivated modification—a sequence where the locking capability becomes operational only after marker placement, satisfying the claim limitation. The court thus affirmed under either claim construction, applying de novo review to legal determinations and substantial evidence review to the Board's factual findings regarding what the prior art would have taught an ordinarily skilled artisan.

The Federal Circuit affirmed the PTAB's determination that all claims of Pictometry International Corporation's U.S. Patent No. 9,183,538 are unpatentable for obviousness over prior art references proposed by Roofr Inc. in an inter partes review. The patent claims methods and systems for estimating roof area using aerial imagery by calculating a roof's "predominant pitch" and "footprint." Pictometry argued on appeal that the Board erred in interpreting "predominant pitch" and that the prior art did not disclose calculating predominant pitch using a weighted average as required by dependent claims.

The court's analysis turned on whether Pictometry had adequately preserved its claim construction argument—it had not squarely raised the construction issue in post-institution briefing—and whether the Board's implicit construction allowing multiple possible meanings of "predominant pitch" was reasonable. The court held that even if "predominant pitch" required a weighted average of all roof pitches, substantial evidence supported the Board's finding that a skilled artisan would understand the prior art's "predominant slope" to encompass that methodology, drawing on expert testimony and industry dictionaries showing weighted averaging was a known technique. The court applied KSR's framework permitting consideration of inferences and creative steps that would be obvious to a skilled artisan, upholding the Board's conclusion that applying weighted averaging yielded predictable results.