Federal Circuit Declines to Extend Patent Exhaustion Doctrine

The Federal Circuit recently held that a patentee acted as its own lexicographer to define a claim term even though it did not explicitly define the term. Rather, because the patentee consistently and clearly used two terms interchangeably to describe the same structural feature and did so in all of the embodiments in which the feature appeared, the patentee impliedly gave the term its own, unique definition.

The Federal Circuit recently held an asserted patent was not entitled to its priority date because the priority application lacked written description support for the asserted claims. In so doing, the court explained that broad disclosures that do not provide reasonably specific support for narrower claims do not meet the written description requirement. The court also considered whether the inventor’s testimony showed they possessed the full scope of the claimed genus at the priority date or whether it was more likely the inventors first became aware of the claimed embodiments from public disclosures of the accused product.

In a Hatch-Waxman case, the District of Delaware denied a motion for summary judgment seeking to apply the ANDA filing date as the date of the hypothetical negotiation used to calculate reasonable royalty damages. Instead, the court determined that the appropriate date to use for the hypothetical negotiation is the launch date.

The district of Delaware recently denied a defendant’s partial motion to dismiss pre-suit willful infringement from the litigation, finding instead that the allegations taken as a whole were sufficient to support pre-suit willfulness at the pleading stage. Specifically, the court found that the allegations as to the defendant’s involvement in a related foreign opposition proceeding and participation in the relevant industry were accompanied by detailed factual support that sufficiently pleaded willful infringement for the pre-suit period.