HTC hit with mixed verdict from Court of Appeals for Federal Circuit
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has part-affirmed and part-vacated a USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) decision covering a patent dispute between by mobile patent licensor IPCom and HTC.
In January 2016, IPCom sued HTC for patent infringement in relation to US patent number 6,879,830— which allows a mobile phone call to transfer from one base station to another.
A base station is a short-range transceiver which connects a cordless phone, computer, or other wireless device to a central hub and allows connection to a network.
HTC then filed an inter-partes examination request, which was granted by the United States Patent and Trademark office (USPTO).
Despite the invalidity request, a USPTO examiner found it to be patentable during the first of two stages of the review.
On appeal to the PTAB, new rejections were issued on the grounds of “obviousness”.
At the second stage of review, despite amendments to the claim by IPCom, the PTAB still found the patent to be “obvious”.
That brought the case to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which handed down its decision on Friday, July 7.
IPCom claimed that the “board lacked jurisdiction to review the examiner’s patentability determination,” and that the “board’s obviousness rejections were based on a flawed claim construction.”
Justice Raymond Chen, who delivered the verdict, said the board did have “the authority to consider the patentability of the claims and thus reject IPCom’s procedural challenge.”
However, he stated that the board “failed to conduct a proper claim construction” of the complaint and so the court “vacates and remands the obviousness rejections based on that limitation”.
All other aspects of the board’s decision were upheld.
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