Opinions — Monday, August 31, 2026

The Federal Circuit vacated-in-part and affirmed-in-part the Eastern District of Texas's final judgment following a jury trial in which Constellation Designs, LLC prevailed against LG Electronics Inc. and affiliated entities for willful infringement of claims across four patents—U.S. Patent Nos. 8,842,761, 10,693,700, 11,019,509, and 11,018,922—relating to non-uniform signal constellations in digital communication systems. The court vacated the district court's summary judgment of patent eligibility under 35 U.S.C. § 101 for claims 17, 21, 24, and 28 of the '761 patent and claim 5 of the '700 patent (the "optimization claims"), which recite geometrically spaced symbol constellations optimized for capacity using parallel decode capacity, but affirmed the eligibility determination for claims 21 and 23 of the '509 patent and claims 24 and 44 of the '922 patent (the "constellation claims"), which recite specific non-uniform constellations with defined coordinate points. The court also affirmed the district court's denial of LG's motion for judgment as a matter of law of non-infringement and its denial of LG's challenges to damages and the admissibility of Constellation's damages expert testimony.

The decision signals a potentially significant dividing line in § 101 eligibility analysis between claims reciting an optimization process applied to achieve improved technical results and claims reciting specific end products resulting from such processes. By vacating eligibility for the optimization claims while affirming it for the constellation claims, the court appears to have found that claims directed to constellations "optimized for capacity using parallel decode capacity" may impermissibly claim an abstract idea or mathematical algorithm, while claims reciting particular constellation point coordinates discovered through that optimization process survive as patent-eligible applications. This distinction carries strategic importance for patent prosecutors and litigants in communications and signal processing technologies, suggesting that claiming specific implementations or data structures may offer more reliable eligibility protection than claiming the optimization methodology itself, even when both purport to address the same technical problem of improving signal transmission at reduced signal-to-noise ratios.

The Federal Circuit affirmed both the district court's grant of partial summary judgment of non-infringement for Samsung devices incorporating Qualcomm chips and the denial of Evolved Wireless's motion for a new trial on infringement for devices with non-Qualcomm chips, as well as the denial of Samsung's motion for JMOL of invalidity for lack of written description. The patents at issue, U.S. Patent No. RE46,679 and its parent U.S. Patent No. 7,809,373, relate to "contention-free" handover procedures in LTE networks using dedicated preambles to eliminate collision when mobile devices transition between base stations. The dispute centered on whether a 1993 license agreement between original patent owner LG and Qualcomm, as amended through 2010, survived the agreement's 2018 termination and barred infringement claims against Samsung.

On the license issue, the court applied California contract law to interpret survival provisions in the 2004 and 2010 amendments, affirming that Sections 5.3 and 10.3 of the 2004 Amendment demonstrated the parties' intent for Qualcomm's covenant not to sue to survive termination of the broader agreement. On infringement, the court applied the Fifth Circuit's abuse-of-discretion standard for denial of a new trial, holding that where Evolved pursued a standards-based infringement theory requiring proof that compliance with the LTE standard necessarily infringes, Samsung presented legally sufficient evidence that LTE-compliant implementations could avoid infringement because the standard's "dedicated RACH preamble" permits some probability of collision, unlike the patent's zero-collision "dedicated preamble" limitation. On written description, the court applied substantial evidence review to uphold the jury's validity finding, concluding that expert testimony linking the parent patent's disclosure of "information of the signature and the preamble" to the reissue patent's "dedicated preamble" and "index of the dedicated preamble" limitations, supplemented by references to prior art understood by skilled artisans, provided adequate support.

The Federal Circuit affirmed the District of Delaware's finding that the asserted claims of Exelixis's U.S. Patents Nos. 11,091,439, 11,091,440, and 11,098,349—directed to crystalline cabozantinib (L)-malate salts, formulations containing them, and methods of treating cancer with them—satisfy the written description requirement under 35 U.S.C. § 112(a). The court dismissed MSN's appeal as to claim 3 of the '349 patent, which concerned compositions essentially free of a genotoxic impurity, after Exelixis dismissed its cross-appeal on noninfringement, rendering the noninfringement judgment final. The central issue was whether the specification's disclosure of the chemical name, formula, and crystalline structure of cabozantinib (L)-malate—along with two specific polymorphs, N-1 and N-2—adequately described the broader genus of all crystalline cabozantinib (L)-malate salts. Reviewing the district court's factual findings for clear error, the Federal Circuit held that the specification disclosed structural features common to the genus sufficient to enable a person of ordinary skill to visualize and recognize its members, analogizing to GlaxoSmithKline LLC v. Banner Pharmacaps, Inc., 744 F.3d 725 (Fed. Cir. 2014).

The decision clarifies that structural genus claims covering polymorphs may satisfy written description without disclosing all possible species or their functional properties, where the specification identifies defining structural features such as chemical name, formula, and crystallinity that distinguish the claimed genus. The court rejected MSN's argument that differences in physical properties like density, melting point, and solubility among disclosed polymorphs rendered the description inadequate for undisclosed polymorphs, finding MSN failed to explain why such unclaimed properties mattered to the structural analysis under Ariad Pharmaceuticals, Inc. v. Eli Lilly & Co., 598 F.3d 1336 (Fed. Cir. 2010). The opinion reinforces that the representative-species and common-structural-features tests are alternative paths to adequate written description, and distinguishes AbbVie Deutschland GmbH & Co., KG v. Janssen Biotech, Inc., 759 F.3d 1285 (Fed. Cir. 2014), where meaningful structural differences were demonstrated. The relatively small potential genus size (fourteen forms maximum) and absence of functional limitations in the claims supported the finding that chemical identity and crystallinity sufficed without exhaustive disclosure of every polymorph's individual characteristics.

The Federal Circuit affirmed the PTAB's determination that claims 1-19 of SpaceTime3D's U.S. Patent No. 9,304,654 and claims 1-20 of its U.S. Patent No. 9,696,868 would have been obvious over the Anthony-Hanggie prior art combination. The patents relate to graphical user interfaces allowing users to switch between applications by displaying images in a three-dimensional space and, upon selection, displaying the corresponding application in a two-dimensional space. SpaceTime3D challenged the Board's construction of two claim limitations: one requiring images to be displayed in an order based on the last time the user opened and interacted with an application, and another requiring replacement of images in 3D space with corresponding objects in 2D space.

The court's claim construction analysis turned on rejecting SpaceTime3D's attempt to import limitations not present in the claim language. For the ordering limitation, the court held that "one of" three enumerated opening-and-interacting events means the system determines timing of three events, not six disaggregated actions as SpaceTime3D proposed. For the replacement limitation, the court declined to import a "rendered" state requirement from claim language in a related patent, finding that "said object" does not require the object to appear in the precise state it previously existed. The court applied de novo review to claim construction and substantial evidence review to the Board's underlying factual findings supporting its obviousness determination.

The Federal Circuit affirmed the PTAB's final written decision in consolidated inter partes reviews of U.S. Patent No. 8,881,048, which claims a GUI displaying webpages as objects in a 3D space and, upon selection, displaying the corresponding webpage in a 2D space. The Board found Apple and Google failed to prove claims 1-13 unpatentable but succeeded as to claims 14-18, prompting Apple's appeal and SpaceTime3D's cross-appeal. The central dispute turned on claim construction: claims 1-13 require displaying "the rendered first webpage" (construed as the previously rendered version from which the corresponding image was captured), while claim 14 requires displaying "the first webpage" without the "rendered" qualifier.

The court's analysis centered on three procedural and substantive points. First, the Board correctly construed "the rendered first webpage" based on antecedent basis principles—the definite article "the" refers back to the webpage previously rendered for image capture—and properly distinguished this from claim 14's broader "the first webpage." Second, the Board did not abuse its discretion in excluding Apple's reply-stage evidence on browser caching, finding it crossed the line from responsive argument to introducing new prior art to teach a claim limitation that should have been presented initially. Third, the court rejected SpaceTime3D's argument that the Board imposed an improper "express disclosure" requirement in evaluating obviousness, concluding instead that the Board's references to what the prior art did not "clearly specify" reflected a reasonable assessment of insufficient evidence rather than legal error.