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15 February 2017Patents

Apple loses data patent suit at Federal Circuit

Apple has lost a patent lawsuit against a US-based technology company after the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit vacated an earlier decision by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB).

The Federal Circuit decided the precedential opinion yesterday, February 14.

Apple had petitioned for an inter partes review of various claims of a patent owned by PersonalWeb Technologies.

The case concerns US patent number 7,802,310, called “Controlling access to data in a data processing system”.

Apple had asserted that the patent was obvious based on two prior art references.

The PTAB had reviewed the claims and agreed with Apple.

However, PersonalWeb Technologies appealed against the PTAB’s construction of certain claims and the determination of obviousness.

Despite affirming the board’s claim construction, the Federal Circuit vacated the PTAB’s obviousness determination because the PTAB “did not adequately support its findings that the prior art disclosed all elements of the challenged claims”.

The court also vacated the finding that a relevant skilled artisan would have been motivated to combine the prior art references to produce the claimed ‘310 invention with a reasonable expectation of success.

In its ruling, the Federal Circuit said that the PTAB’s 2015 decision was not substantiated as the PTAB “merely” agreed with Apple that a skilled artisan would have been motivated to combine the references for the ‘310 claims at issue.

The court remanded the case for further proceedings.

The decision is available in full here.

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