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.
A.L.M. Holding Co., et al. v. Zydex Industries Private Ltd., et al.
No. 2025-1317 (Fed. Cir. (D. Del.) May 19, 2026). Opinion by Chen, joined by Cunningham and Stark.
A.L.M. and Ergon Asphalt & Emulsions jointly own six patents that relate to warm-mix asphalt paving methods and compositions. Before filing suit against Zydex, they entered into an agreement licensing several rights under the patents to an exclusive licensee, including the rights to manufacture, import, use, sell, and offer to sell licensed products. But the patent owners retained other rights, including the right to sue third parties for infringement.
In the litigation, Zydex moved to dismiss the lawsuit for lack of Article III standing. The district court granted the motion and thus dismissed the action without prejudice. The court concluded that the patent owners lacked constitutional standing, relying primarily on Morrow v. Microsoft Corp., 499 F.3d 1332 (Fed. Cir. 2007), where a plaintiff’s bare contractual right to sue—separated from all other patent rights—“did not confer an exclusionary right sufficient for constitutional standing.”
The patent owners appealed, and the Federal Circuit reversed. To begin, the Federal Circuit stated that “Article III standing requires the plaintiff to establish the ‘irreducible constitutional minimum of standing’: (1) injury in fact; (2) causation; and (3) redressability.” In this case, the parties disputed only the first requirement—injury in fact—which “requires an actual or imminent, concrete and particularized invasion of a legally protected interest.”
The Federal Circuit summarized that “for patent infringement lawsuits, in general, the question for the constitutional injury-in-fact inquiry is whether a party retains an exclusionary right,” and “a patent owner has exclusionary rights as a baseline matter unless it has transferred all exclusionary rights away.” The court noted that, although the Article III inquiry is distinct from the question of statutory standing under 35 U.S.C. § 281, “cases analyzing statutory standing can be instructive for constitutional standing” because “the same facts bearing on whether a patent owner has granted ‘all substantial rights’ to a licensee to enable the licensee to have statutory standing may also bear on whether the owner retained ‘an exclusionary’ right sufficient for constitutional standing.”
Applied here, the Federal Circuit ruled that the patent owners’ “retained right to sue,” combined with their sublicensing veto and royalty interests, collectively established a “non-illusory exclusionary interest” sufficient for Article III standing. The court distinguished Morrow, explaining that unlike the plaintiff in Morrow, whose right to sue was “illusory,” here the patent owners did not possess “only a bare right to sue”; rather, they “retained an exclusionary right sufficient to satisfy the ‘irreducible constitutional minimum of standing.’”