Opinions — Friday, August 14, 2026

The Federal Circuit affirmed the district court's denial of preliminary injunction and reconsideration in a design patent infringement action brought by Jacki Easlick, LLC against AccEncyc US, a Chinese seller of handbag hanger hooks, concerning U.S. Design Patent No. D695,526. The case arose from a "Schedule A" lawsuit joining 67 online sellers, in which Jacki Easlick obtained an ex parte temporary restraining order before moving for a preliminary injunction. The district court found that Jacki Easlick failed to establish likelihood of success on the merits or irreparable harm as to AccEncyc, the only defendant that contested the motion.

The court's analysis underscores the proper application of the ordinary observer test in design patent cases involving both functional and ornamental elements. The district court correctly separated functional features (two attached hooks, vertical configuration) from ornamental ones (hook shape, tip flare, 90-degree offset, spheres) before comparing overall visual effect, not isolated design details. The Federal Circuit rejected the argument that identifying distinguishing features—here, the corkscrew versus laterally bent center and different hook ends—constituted improper focus on details rather than overall design, clarifying that courts must necessarily point out significant differences when conducting the mandated overall comparison. On irreparable harm, the court found that conclusory statements in declarations, unsupported by evidence of actual harm to profits, customer relationships, or brand value, were insufficient even where the defendant did not brief the issue.

The Federal Circuit affirmed the Patent Trial and Appeal Board's final written decision in an inter partes review finding claims 4–6, 8, 11–14, and 18–20 of The Nielsen Company's U.S. Patent No. 11,470,243 unpatentable as obvious under 35 U.S.C. § 103. The '243 patent relates to audience measurement systems that use cameras to capture images of television viewers, with the challenged claims reciting processor circuitry that reduces the resolution of a first image to obtain a reduced-resolution image and determines head orientation based on that reduced-resolution image. Nielsen argued that the Board erred in treating a scientific publication by Ying-li Tian as analogous prior art and that Tian's teachings did not render the claims obvious. The court held that substantial evidence supported the Board's determination that Tian was reasonably pertinent analogous art because both Tian and the '243 patent were directed to problems in image processing and facial detection, rejecting Nielsen's argument that the relevant problem must be tethered exclusively to the specification's express identification of problems related to overuse of illumination sources. The court further held that Tian's disclosure of down-sampling to reduce resolution satisfied the claim limitations, and that claims 5 and 6 did not require a full-resolution second image for facial recognition as Nielsen contended.

The decision reinforces that the Board may identify the problem confronting an inventor based on the objective scope of the claims and patent disclosures generally, rather than being confined to problems expressly articulated in the specification, particularly where the claims themselves are broader than the specific embodiments addressing those express problems. The holding confirms that a patent may address multiple problems simultaneously—both explicitly identified specific problems and broader general problems—and that the reasonably pertinent inquiry focuses on whether prior art relates to any of those problems. The decision also clarifies procedural bounds in IPR practice: while acknowledging that field-of-endeavor and reasonable-pertinence analyses are separate tests under In re Bigio, the court applied Netflix to hold that evidence and analysis relating to both prongs may overlap sufficiently to provide notice, and that a reasonably pertinent theory may be implicit in a petition's discussion of the claims and prior art combination rationale. The harmless error provision of the APA applies where a patent owner fails to identify prejudice from allegedly inadequate notice.