Our Patent Case Summaries provide a weekly summary of the precedential patent-related opinions issued by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and the opinions designated precedential or informative by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.
Apple Inc., et al. v. Squires
No. 2024-1864 (Fed. Cir. (N.D. Cal.) Feb. 13, 2026). Opinion by Taranto, joined by Lourie and Chen.
Apple and several other companies challenged the NHK-Fintiv instructions issued by the Director of the Patent and Trademark Office governing how the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, as the Director’s delegatee, exercises the Director’s discretionary authority to decline to institute IPR proceedings. Apple asserted that the instructions led to too many non-institution decisions and were legally defective under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). In particular, Apple asserted that the instructions were issued without formal notice-and-comment rulemaking as defined by the APA, 5 U.S.C. § 553.
The district court rejected the challenge, holding that the instructions did not have to be issued through notice-and-comment rulemaking. Apple appealed.
The Federal Circuit affirmed. The court held that “the Director’s instructions are a ‘general statement of policy’ exempted from notice-and-comment rulemaking procedures by the express terms of § 553(b).” The Federal Circuit explained that “general statements of policy are pronouncements that do not have the force and effect of law” and “are merely statements issued by an agency to advise the public prospectively of the manner in which the agency proposes to exercise a discretionary power.” In contrast, substantive/legislative rules requiring notice-and-comment rulemaking are those that “alter the landscape of individual rights and obligations, binding parties with the force and effect of law.”
The Federal Circuit stated that “Congress provided no legal right to institution of an IPR, which is just one of several mechanisms for adjudicating challenges to patents.” And the challenged instructions “are simply instructions to the Board for how, as the Director’s delegatee, it should exercise in the first instance the Director’s statutory discretionary authority not to institute an IPR.” The instructions “do not even purport to bind the Director, who has always retained the authority to make the non-institution decision even after an initial Board decision as delegatee.”
For those reasons, the court affirmed the district court’s decision that notice-and-comment rulemaking was not required for the challenged instructions.
The Federal Circuit also ruled that more recent agency actions, including the Director’s announcement that he would be making institution decisions directly, did not render this dispute moot.
GoTV Streaming, LLC v. Netflix, Inc.
Nos. 2024-1669, -1744 (Fed. Cir. (C.D. Cal.) Feb. 9, 2026). Opinion by Taranto, joined by Prost and Clevenger.
GoTV sued Netflix for infringement of three related patents directed to methods and systems of using a server to tailor, to a particular wireless device’s capabilities, the presentation specifications for requested content delivered to that device. Before trial, the district court dismissed GoTV’s claims of induced infringement, rejected Netflix’s challenge to eligibility under 35 U.S.C. § 101, held all claims of one patent indefinite, and denied GoTV’s motion to exclude certain proposed damages evidence. A jury found that Netflix infringed only one claim of the remaining patents, and awarded damages. After the district court denied several of GoTV’s post-trial motions and entered final judgment for Netflix, GoTV appealed and Netflix cross-appealed.
On Netflix’s cross‑appeal, the Federal Circuit held all asserted claims ineligible under § 101. Under Alice step one, the court concluded, contrary to the district court, that a representative claim was directed to the abstract idea of a template set of specifications that can be tailored for final production of the specified product to fit a user’s constraints. Proceeding to Alice step two, the Federal Circuit explained that the claims recite no specificity for performing the tailoring that might go beyond result-focused functional language. The court also held that conclusory assertions regarding speed and efficiency benefits achieved through ordinary computer and network functionality were insufficient to confer patent eligibility on an otherwise abstract idea.
As part of its ineligibility analysis, the Federal Circuit reversed the district court’s indefiniteness ruling as to the phrase “discrete low level rendering command.” The Federal Circuit adopted GoTV’s construction and held that the specification provided sufficient guidance for a relevant artisan to understand the meaning of the claim phrase with reasonable certainty.
Because invalidity under § 101 was dispositive, the Federal Circuit did not reach the merits of GoTV’s remaining appellate arguments. The court nevertheless vacated the district court’s summary judgment of no inducement and its denial of GoTV’s post-trial motion for a new trial on damages, concluding that GoTV presented sufficiently substantial arguments of district court error on those issues. The Federal Circuit ultimately reversed, vacated-in-part, and directed entry of judgment for Netflix.
Netflix, Inc. v. DivX, LLC
No. 2024-1541 (Fed. Cir. (PTAB) Feb. 13, 2026). Opinion by Taranto, joined by Moore and Dyk.
DivX owns a patent directed to systems and methods for streaming partly encrypted media content. After DivX sued Netflix for infringement, Netflix filed an IPR petition challenging the patent’s claims as obvious over specified prior-art references.
In a final written decision, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board concluded that Netflix failed to establish unpatentability of the claims, and Netflix appealed. The Federal Circuit vacated the Board’s decision and remanded, ruling that the Board’s analysis of reasonable expectation of success was erroneous.
On remand, the Board, by a divided vote, concluded again that Netflix had not shown unpatentability of the asserted claims. This time, the Board did so by accepting DivX’s proposed construction of a disputed claim limitation requiring “locating encryption information that identifies encrypted portions of frames of video within the requested portions of the selected stream of protected video.” The Board held that the encryption information itself must be located within the requested portions of the selected stream of protected video. Based on that construction, the Board rejected Netflix’s obviousness challenge, and Netflix again appealed.
The Federal Circuit reversed the Board’s claim construction and thus vacated the final written decision and remanded. The court began by noting that the disputed limitation was “susceptible of two different interpretations, each syntactically and semantically available.” The court explained that “the modifier ‘within the requested portions of the selected stream of protected video’ could modify either ‘encrypted portions of frames of video’ or ‘encryption information,’ i.e., could specify the location of either the encrypted portions or the encryption information.”
The court ruled that, “critically, we look to ‘precepts of English grammar’ to determine the ordinary meaning of the phrase as a whole,” including the principle that “the modifier is presumptively understood to be tied to the nearest available semantically plausible modificand.” The Federal Circuit ruled that “this principle clearly calls for Netflix’s construction as the proper default interpretation—only the ‘encrypted portions of frames of video’ (not the ‘encryption information’) need be ‘within the requested portions of the selected stream of protected video.’”
The Federal Circuit noted that this precept establishes only “a presumptive interpretation,” meaning “the analysis cannot stop there.” The court thus looked to see if “there are good indications that a contrary interpretation is the better one.” Finding none, whether in the claim language or the specification, and concluding that “the prosecution history provides one additional bit of support for reading the specification” according to Netflix’s view, the Federal Circuit reversed the Board’s claim construction and remanded.