Opinions — Thursday, June 4, 2026

The Federal Circuit vacated infringement and damages judgments and remanded for a new trial in Ollnova Technologies Ltd. v. ecobee Technologies ULC, an appeal from a jury verdict in the Eastern District of Texas finding ecobee liable for infringing at least one of four asserted patents (U.S. Patent Nos. 7,860,495, 8,264,371, 7,746,887, and 8,224,282) directed to wireless building automation systems. The court held that the district court committed reversible error by using a single general verdict question asking whether ecobee infringed "ANY" of the asserted claims across all four patents, rather than requiring the jury to specify which patent or patents were infringed. Because the jury also found the '282 patent's asserted claims invalid and determined separate validity for each patent, the general verdict form created fatal ambiguity—the court could not determine whether the infringement finding rested on valid or invalid patents. On the 35 U.S.C. § 101 issues, the court vacated and remanded for further proceedings under Alice step two as to the '495 patent, holding that the district court's jury instruction was defective because it failed to inform the jury that the claims were directed to an abstract idea and did not instruct that the abstract idea itself cannot supply the inventive concept. The court affirmed that the '887 and '371 patents' asserted claims were not directed to abstract ideas under Alice step one, and affirmed denial of judgment as a matter of law of non-infringement as to the '371 patent.

The decision reinforces that verdict forms in multi-patent cases must enable appellate courts to determine the basis for liability with sufficient specificity to assess whether any finding rests on invalid claims. The court rejected the argument that substantial evidence of infringement across all patents could cure the verdict form defect, holding that such an approach would improperly require appellate fact-finding and deny the parties their right to jury resolution of contested factual issues on remand. On patent eligibility, the court's analysis of the '887 and '371 patents provides guidance on when technical improvements to wireless systems avoid abstract idea categorization at Alice step one: the '887 patent's dynamic polling and selective transmission to reduce bandwidth and power consumption, and the '371 patent's aggregation of change-of-value messages with redundancy mechanisms for communication failures, were held to be directed to technological solutions rather than abstract concepts. The ruling underscores that district courts cannot delegate Alice step one determinations to juries while simultaneously failing to instruct juries on the governing legal framework when submitting step two questions, as such instructions must clarify that abstract ideas themselves cannot provide the requisite inventive concept.

The Federal Circuit reversed the Patent Trial and Appeal Board's determination that claims 10-14 of Globus Medical's U.S. Patent No. 8,845,731, directed to an expandable spinal fusion device, were not unpatentable. The parties' sole dispute centered on construction of the claim term "complementary with one another," which describes the relationship between ramped portions on the device's two endplates. Life Spine argued the term encompassed ramps with mirrored angles, while Globus advocated for a narrower construction requiring the ramps to "complete one another."

The court's analysis turned significantly on the specification's disclosure of an embodiment in Figure 40 that would fall outside the claims under Globus's construction but within Life Spine's broader reading. Applying the principle that claim terms normally should not be construed to exclude disclosed embodiments, the court credited Life Spine's construction, finding that the specification's single use of "complementary" referred to different components entirely and provided no meaningful support for requiring the ramped portions to complete one another. The court also gave weight to the prosecution history, noting that the examiner consistently understood "complementary with one another" to include mirrored angles rather than requiring structural completion.

The Federal Circuit affirmed the district court's judgment that Arendi's asserted claims in four patents — the '843, '854, '356, and '993 patents — are invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101 as directed to patent-ineligible subject matter. The patents concern identifying information in a document and using it to search an external source such as a contact database. After the district court granted Rule 12(c) judgment on the pleadings as to three patents but allowed the '843 patent to proceed to trial, a jury found no infringement and invalidity of the '843 patent, and the district court later clarified through an amended judgment that both the noninfringement and invalidity findings remained undisturbed. Google raised § 101 invalidity as an alternative ground for affirmance.

The court rejected the district court's distinction of the '843 patent from the other three patents and held all four patents directed to the abstract idea of collecting information, analyzing it, retrieving related information, and using the result — consistently deemed abstract under Electric Power Group and IBM v. Zillow. The court found that Arendi's purported improvements — facilitating coordination between programs and reducing user steps — merely restated the abstract idea and could not supply an inventive concept at Alice step two. The court determined that implementing the abstract idea using generic computer components performing conventional functions, without claiming a specific technical solution or particular implementation of structures like the "input device," failed to transform the claims into patent-eligible applications.