The Federal Circuit has ruled that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) lacks the power to invalidate claims in an inter partes review (IPR) due to indefiniteness. In a February 4 decision, the appeals court overturned an IPR final written decision in which the Board had invalidated several claims as indefinite, holding that the PTAB does not possess the statutory authority to do so. However, as to the specific IPR at issue, the Federal Circuit ruled that the PTAB should have considered the validity of certain claims under Sections 102 and 103, which the Board stopped short of doing due to its erroneous conclusion that a certain claim limitation qualified for “means-plus-function” treatment under 35 USC Section 112, paragraph six.

In October 2017, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) saw the filing of petitions for inter partes review (IPR) against a variety of frequent litigants, including publicly traded NPEs Acacia Research Corporation and Xperi Corporation, as well as privately held Monument Patent Holdings, LLC and Uniloc Corporation Pty. Limited. The Board also instituted trial in October for IPRs against multiple Acacia subsidiaries, Uniloc, and Papst Licensing GmbH & Company Kg. In addition, the PTAB issued an IPR final decision cancelling multiple claims from a data compression patent held by prolific plaintiff Realtime Data LLC, including the single claim that Riverbed Technology (one of the petitioners for the IPR) was found to infringe in a $4.3M verdict in May, with other final decisions issued in campaigns waged by TQ Delta LLC and publicly traded Quarterhill Inc. IPRs against IP Bridge, Inc. and Mobile Telecommunications Technologies, LLC also ended in termination in October after the patent owners requested adverse judgments.

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) continued to see the filing of petitions for inter partes review (IPR) against publicly traded NPEs in March 2017, including Acacia Research Corporation; Finjan Holdings, Inc.; Pendrell Corporation; TiVo Corporation (formerly known as Rovi Corporation); and Wi-LAN Inc. (WiLAN). A variety of prolific, privately held NPEs were also targeted for IPR throughout March, including Blackbird Tech LLC, General Patent Corporation, IP Edge LLC, Realtime Data LLC, and Papst Licensing GmbH & Company Kg, along with several inventors and inventor-controlled NPEs and an assortment of other plaintiffs.

Inventor-controlled NPE Prisua Engineering Corp. has filed its first lawsuit (1:16-cv-21761), targeting Samsung over the alleged infringement of a single patent (8,650,591) generally related to combining multiple images based on user input. The accused products include smartphones and tablets that contain a feature called “Best Face”, which allows users to combine multiple images by specifying the desired portions from each frame.