The Federal Circuit’s latest patent decisions show how frequently the court’s work comes down to the meaning of claim terms. In two cases, the appellate court found that lower tribunals had gotten claim construction wrong. It vacated a Patent Trial and Appeal Board rejection of a catheter patent application as obvious and remanded, and it separately vacated an infringement judgment against Nine Energy Service, holding that a Texas court had misconstrued two terms in NCS Multistage’s patent.
Other rulings went the other way. The court affirmed a stipulated noninfringement judgment for Amazon in AlterWAN v. Amazon, over a dissenting judge’s warning that claim construction had become a “rabbit hole.” It also affirmed summary judgment of noninfringement in Moskowitz Family v. Globus Medical, including the construction of the term “universal.”
One decision veered from claim construction entirely. In TexasLDPC v. Broadcom, the Federal Circuit reversed a dismissal and revived patent and copyright claims, holding that an exclusive licensee could sue even though the patent owner was not joined.
The decisions agree that claim construction is often decisive, but they differ in outcome: the court corrected erroneous readings in some cases and upheld lower-court judgments in others. Procedural questions such as standing can also determine whether a case proceeds at all.