Fresh From the Bench: Latest Precedential Patent Case

CASE OF THE WEEK

Honeywell International Inc. v. 3G Licensing, S.A., Appeal Nos. 2023-1354, -1384, -1407 (Fed. Cir. Jan. 2, 2025)

In this week’s Case of the Week, the Federal Circuit reversed an inter partes review finding of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, which had upheld the patentability of challenged claims of appellee 3G Licensing’s U.S. Patent No. 7,319,718. The ’718 patent claimed transmission encoding methods essential to the 3G and 4G cellular communications standards, and was weighed against prior art that comprised 3G consortium members’ consideration of desirable standards shortly before the patent’s critical date. A majority of the reviewing panel found the challenged claims reflected no more than routine experimentation and optimization of a proposal that had been circulated prior to the patent’s filing, and were therefore unpatentable as obvious.

Broadly speaking, the ’718 patent claimed a method of reducing errors in the transmission of channel quality information (CQI), a metric that had been used in cellular communications services to inform the allocation of bandwidth. The ’718 patent’s claims were directed to encoding the five-bit CQI into a 20-bit “codeword,” using conversion methods that redundantly repeated certain bits of the CQI to compensate for transmission errors.

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Editors:

Nika Aldrich, IP Litigation Group Leader, Schwabe

Jason A. Wrubleski, Shareholder