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.
ironSource Ltd. v. Digital Turbine, Inc.
No. 2024-1831 (Fed. Cir. (PTAB) Apr. 7, 2026). Opinion by Moore, joined by Lourie and Reyna.
Digital Turbine owns a patent relating to downloading and installing mobile device applications in the background rather than directing a user to an application store. ironSource petitioned the Patent Trial and Appeal Board for PGR of the patent’s claims.
After the Board instituted the PGR, Digital Turbine filed a motion to amend, and later a revised motion to amend, proposing substitute claims. The Board granted the motion because ironSource failed to show that the proposed substitute claims were unpatentable or patent-ineligible. The Board also determined that the original claims were unpatentable. After receiving these adverse rulings, ironSource appealed.
The Federal Circuit dismissed the appeal for lack of Article III standing, which is “a threshold jurisdictional issue that must be addressed before a court can reach the merits of an appeal.” The Federal Circuit reiterated that “although a party need not establish Article III standing to file a PGR petition or obtain a Board decision, a party challenging the validity of a patent must establish Article III standing once it seeks review in this Court.”
ironSource argued it had standing based on potential infringement liability suggested by Digital Turbine’s “veiled threats” of infringement. In support, ironSource relied on a declaration of its Senior Director of Strategic Partnership Management. But the Federal Circuit determined the declaration to be “insufficient to establish an injury in fact because, although it establishes that ironSource previously developed and released a product, it fails to demonstrate concrete plans to reintroduce this product with features that are implicated by the substitute claims at issue.”
The Federal Circuit ruled that ironSource presented neither argument nor evidence linking Digital Turbine’s earlier infringement allegations, which related to a particular patent, with the narrower substitute claims at issue in the PGR. Because ironSource did not show how its product features are implicated by the substitute claims, which introduced narrowing limitations, the Federal Circuit concluded that ironSource “failed to show injury in fact based on potential infringement liability.” The court thus dismissed the appeal.