Opinions — Thursday, August 27, 2026

The Seventh Circuit affirmed the district court's denial of Meta's motion to compel arbitration of Metroplex Communications' putative class action asserting false advertising claims under § 43(a)(1)(B) of the Lanham Act and Illinois state law. Metroplex, a local news outlet operator that sells advertising, alleged that Meta knowingly inflated Facebook audience-reach metrics to induce businesses to purchase ads on Facebook rather than on competing platforms like Metroplex's outlets, thereby unfairly siphoning advertisers away from competitors. Meta sought to compel arbitration based on an arbitration clause in its Commercial Terms, which Metroplex had accepted when purchasing Facebook ads for its own platforms. The district court found the claims outside the scope of the arbitration clause, reasoning that Metroplex's injury was as a competitor in the ad sales market rather than as a Facebook ad purchaser.

The decision turns on the Seventh Circuit's application of Illinois contract law to determine whether Metroplex's unfair competition claims bore a sufficient nexus to its own ad purchases on Facebook. Though the arbitration clause used broad "arising out of or relating to" language covering disputes tied to "any access or use" of Meta's products for commercial purposes, the court held that even broad arbitration clauses require claims to be "strongly tied to the underlying contract" and to "draw [their] very essence from the fact of and performance under the agreement in question." The court rejected Meta's argument that any claim touching on Meta's advertising practices falls within the clause merely because the plaintiff once purchased Facebook ads, calling that interpretation an "absurd result" that would transform a commercial terms agreement into a perpetual waiver of judicial recourse for all claims against Meta by anyone who had ever advertised on Facebook. The court emphasized that Metroplex's claims concerned Meta's public representations and anticompetitive conduct toward competitors, not Meta's contractual performance as to Metroplex's own "purely coincidental" and limited ad purchases, thus breaking the necessary connection between the substance of the claims and the contract containing the arbitration clause.

In Aerin Medical Inc. v. Neurent Medical Inc. (Nos. 2025-2099, 2025-2100, 2025-2101) and The Foundry, LLC v. Neurent Medical Inc. (Nos. 2025-2113, 2025-2114, 2025-2121), appeals from six PTAB inter partes review proceedings, the Federal Circuit dismissed all appeals under Fed. R. App. P. 42(b) based on the parties' stipulation, with each side to bear its own costs.

The Federal Circuit affirmed the Patent Trial and Appeal Board's determination that Apple failed to prove claims 1-3 and 5 of Smart Mobile Technologies' U.S. Patent No. 9,319,075 unpatentable as obvious. The '075 patent, part of a family claiming priority to 1999, covers wireless devices with transmission control and multiple IP-based communication paths. The central dispute concerned construction of the claim term "multiplexing signals" appearing in the preamble of independent claim 1, with the Board adopting Smart Mobile's construction—"combining multiple signal streams into one"—and rejecting Apple's broader proposed construction that would have encompassed "switching" (sequential transmission without combination).

The court's analysis turned entirely on its companion decision issued the same day in Apple Inc. v. Smart Mobile Technologies LLC, No. 24-1607, involving related patents from the same family. The court incorporated by reference both its claim construction analysis and its substantial evidence review of whether the prior art (Yegoshin and Bernard) disclosed "multiplexing signals" as construed. The court applied de novo review to claim construction and substantial evidence review to factual findings regarding extrinsic evidence and prior art disclosures, finding that despite slight differences in claim language between the '075 patent and the related patents—including the '075 patent's explicit textual distinction between "multiplexing signals" and "multiplexed paths"—the outcome remained unchanged.

The Federal Circuit affirmed-in-part and vacated-in-part the Board's final written decisions in inter partes reviews of Smart Mobile Technologies LLC's U.S. Patent Nos. 9,019,946 and 8,842,653, which relate to mobile wireless devices with multiple transmitter and receiver components. Apple appealed the Board's determination that it failed to prove certain claims unpatentable, challenging the Board's implicit construction of "multiplexed signals," while Smart Mobile cross-appealed the Board's finding that other claims (specifically independent claim 17) were obvious, contending the Board's motivation-to-combine analysis was inadequate under the APA.

The court's affirmance on claim construction turned on its agreement with the Board's implicit construction requiring "multiplexed signals" to involve creation of a pre-transmission composite signal for simultaneous sending along a single shared pathway, rejecting Apple's broader reading that would encompass sequential transmission (switching). The court found the claim language itself determinative: because the term modifies "signals" rather than "paths," multiple different signals must be combined and travel together as "multiplexed signals," not merely use the same path at different times. On the cross-appeal, the court vacated under APA arbitrary-and-capricious review, finding the Board failed to adequately address Smart Mobile's arguments regarding motivation to combine for claim 17, having merely incorporated its analysis from claim 1 without explaining why that rationale applied to claim 17's distinct "single transmission interface" limitation.

The Federal Circuit granted a joint motion to remand in Astellas Pharma, Inc. v. Ascent Pharmaceuticals, Inc., remanding to the district court after the parties settled all claims during the pendency of the appeal. The district court had issued an indicative ruling stating it would partially vacate and modify its final judgment if the case were remanded.

The court explicitly declined to take a position on whether vacatur was appropriate or necessary, instead directing the district court to apply the framework from United States Bancorp Mortgage Co. v. Bonner Mall Partnership on its own. This approach preserves the district court's discretion to evaluate settlement-related vacatur principles in the first instance, while the Federal Circuit's remand order enables the parties to effectuate their settlement without appellate court involvement in the vacatur analysis.