Precedential Federal Circuit Opinions

1. WI-LAN INC. v. SHARP ELECTRONICS CORPORATION [OPINION]  (2020-1041, April 6, 2021) (DYK, TARANTO, and STOLL)
   Dyk, J.  Affirming related district court judgments holding that Defendant did not infringe the asserted claims of the patents-at-issue.  With respect to one of the patents-at-issue, the district court granted summary judgment because Plaintiff failed to provide admissible evidence of the source code that Plaintiff needed to prove its infringement theories.  The district court did not abuse its discretion in holding that documents from third-party manufacturers purporting to be source code printouts, together with declarations from employees of the manufacturers purporting to authenticate the source code printouts, were not admissible under Rules 803(6) or 901(b)(4).  Nor could Plaintiff rely on Rule 703, because Rule 703 does not make admissible otherwise inadmissible evidence and Plaintiff did not establish that experts in the field reasonably rely on unauthenticated source code.  With respect to the second patent-at-issue, the district court correctly construed “output multimedia data stream” because the specification describes the output multimedia data stream as being output from the integrated multimedia encoding system.  The district court also correctly construed the term “a multimedia processor, coupled to the data rate analyzer,” based on the patent’s consistent use of “coupled” to refer to components that are not subcomponents of each other and “in” to refer to components that could be sub-components of each other.
2. APPLE INC. v. QUALCOMM INCORPORATED [OPINION]  (2020-1561, 2020-1642, April 7, 2021) (MOORE, REYNA, and HUGHES) 
   Moore, J.  Dismissing for lack of standing two appeals from final inter partes review decisions of the PTAB.  Before the filing of these appeals, Petitioner and Patent Owner settled all litigation between the two companies worldwide and the district court granted their joint motion to dismiss with prejudice Patent Owner’s district court action, which asserted the two patents challenged in these IPRs.  The validity of the challenged patents would not impact Petitioner’s ongoing payment obligations under the parties’ license.  Nor did Petitioner identify any contractual dispute involving its ongoing royalty obligations (e.g., a disagreement over whether certain Petitioner product sales trigger additional royalty payments) that relates to, or could be resolved through a validity determination of, the patents at issue.  Petitioner also did not show an injury-in-fact based on potential future allegations, after the license expires, that Petitioner’s products infringe the challenged patents.  Under the circumstances, the harm Petitioner may face from the application of statutory estoppel under 35 U.S.C. § 315(e) was insufficient to provide standing.
3. RAYTHEON TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION v. GENERAL ELECTRIC COMPANY [OPINION]  (2020-1755, April 16, 2021) (LOURIE, CHEN, and HUGHES)
   Chen, J.  Reversing final inter partes review decision of the PTAB.  The Board legally erred in its prior art enablement analysis, because it did not adequately assess whether the only relevant reference enabled a skilled artisan to make and use the claimed invention.  Patent Owner presented extensive, unrebutted evidence of non-enablement of that reference.  That lack of self-enablement was dispositive because Petitioner did not contend that the claimed invention was enabled by other prior art or evidence of record.