Opinions — Friday, September 11, 2026

The Federal Circuit affirmed the district court's entry of stipulated final judgment of noninfringement of U.S. Patent No. 8,595,478, owned by AlterWAN, in favor of Amazon. The appeal turned on the district court's claim construction of "cooperating service provider" and "non-blocking bandwidth," which had been remanded once before after the Federal Circuit found the initial construction of "non-blocking bandwidth" effectively required the impossible (always-available bandwidth even when the Internet was inoperable). On remand, the district court revised "non-blocking bandwidth" to mean "bandwidth that will always be available and will always be sufficient while the network is able to transmit data," and AlterWAN challenged both constructions on appeal.

The court's analysis is notable for its reliance on prosecution history to supply meaning where the specification was silent—the term "cooperating service provider" never appeared in the specification and was introduced during prosecution over a decade after filing. The court found the patentee had consistently characterized routing to special service providers offering guaranteed bandwidth as the "heart of the invention," both in the '478 patent's prosecution and in the parent patent's prosecution, justifying the construction that tied "cooperating" to the provision of "non-blocking bandwidth." The court also upheld the district court's factual findings based on expert testimony regarding the scope of the carve-out for catastrophic network failures, applying clear error review to those subsidiary facts underlying the claim construction.

The Federal Circuit affirmed the Eastern District of Pennsylvania's grant of summary judgment of noninfringement on the '913 and '022 patents and denial of judgment as a matter of law on the '319 patent in Moskowitz Family LLC v. Globus Medical, Inc. Moskowitz appealed three district court rulings concerning its spinal implant patents: the determination that the preambles of claims 1 and 10 of the '913 patent and claim 47 of the '022 patent are limiting, the construction of "universal" as requiring a device "designed to be inserted between [vertebrae] in any region of the spine" using "any approach," and the denial of JMOL that Globus's accused products infringed claim 1 of the '319 patent's "cooperating" limitation. The Federal Circuit held that the preambles are limiting because they provide antecedent basis for terms in the claim bodies (such as "the intervertebral cage" and "the first integral screw guide") and recite the fundamental characteristic that the invention is a "universal" system capable of use across spinal regions—an essential feature emphasized throughout the specification. The court further upheld the district court's construction of "universal" as requiring design suitability for any spinal region and surgical approach, rejecting Moskowitz's narrower proposed construction of "stand-alone," and found sufficient evidence to support the jury's noninfringement verdict on the '319 patent.

The decision reinforces that preamble language will be treated as limiting when it supplies antecedent basis for claim body terms or recites characteristics that the specification identifies as fundamental to the invention, even when those characteristics appear only in the preamble and not in dependent claim bodies. The court's analysis distinguishes TomTom v. Adolph by emphasizing that preamble terms deeply intertwined with the claimed invention's core identity cannot be excised as mere statements of intended use. For practitioners, this holding underscores the risk of preamble recitations that introduce structural or functional requirements later referenced in claim bodies, particularly when the specification repeatedly characterizes such features as central to the invention. The construction of "universal" also demonstrates the court's willingness to adopt broad readings where the intrinsic record consistently describes adaptability across multiple use contexts, potentially narrowing claim scope significantly when such aspirational language appears in granted claims.