Patent Lawsuit News: Verdicts, PTAB Shifts, and Section 101

The biggest patent lawsuit news of the past year runs along four tracks: a unanimous Supreme Court decision that makes it harder for brand-name drugmakers to sue generics for induced infringement, a second ruling handing CRISPR priority to the Broad Institute, a run of nine-figure tech verdicts (several of them erased on appeal), and a sharp policy turn at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board that has cut the odds of getting a patent reviewed there. Here is where the major fights stand.

Supreme Court Tightens Induced-Infringement Rules in Hikma v. Amarin

On June 4, 2026, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the Federal Circuit in Hikma Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. v. Amarin Pharma, Inc., holding that Amarin failed to state a viable claim that Hikma induced infringement of patents covering cardiovascular uses of Vascepa.¹

The dispute involved “skinny labels,” the Hatch-Waxman mechanism that lets generic makers carve patented uses out of their FDA-approved labeling. Amarin pointed to Hikma’s press releases, website, and marketing materials, arguing they encouraged doctors to prescribe the generic for the patented cardiovascular indication even though the label omitted that use. The Federal Circuit had accepted a standard asking whether a physician could “plausibly read” those materials as encouragement to infringe.¹

Justice Jackson, writing for the Court, rejected that approach. Induced infringement under 35 U.S.C. §271(b) requires “purposeful, culpable expression and conduct” amounting to “affirmative” and “clear” encouragement. The opinion identified three categories that cannot support an inducement claim as a matter of law: compliance with FDA labeling requirements and truthful industry descriptions such as “AB-rated generic equivalent”; silence or omissions about a patented indication; and vague marketing language that requires speculation about how doctors might respond.¹

Brand-name manufacturers can still bring these claims, but they now need to point to specific, affirmative promotional conduct that clearly pushes doctors toward infringing use. Generalized allegations built on FDA-mandated labeling or standard marketing are far more likely to be dismissed at the pleading stage.¹

CRISPR Priority Goes Back to the Broad Institute

The long fight over who invented CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing in human and animal cells shifted again on March 26, 2026, when the PTAB ruled a second time in favor of the Broad Institute, MIT, and Harvard. The judgment, issued on remand from a May 2025 Federal Circuit decision, reaffirmed the Board’s 2022 finding that the UC Berkeley team led by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier did not conceive of the eukaryotic-cell application before the Broad inventors reduced it to practice on October 5, 2012.²

The Federal Circuit had vacated the earlier ruling because the Board applied the wrong standard for “conception” and conflated it with reduction to practice. On remand, the PTAB concluded that the CVC team’s idea could not have been carried out without “extensive research or experimentation,” and denied CVC’s motion for priority.³⁴

The ruling blocks 14 CVC patent applications from moving to allowance at the USPTO. As of late April 2026, CVC had not appealed, though it can request rehearing within one month or appeal to the Federal Circuit within nine weeks of judgment.⁵

Nine-Figure Verdicts, and How Many Survived Appeal

Total patent damages awarded in 2024 reached a record $4.3 billion across more than 90 cases, according to Lex Machina.⁶ The trend held through 2025 and 2026, though several of the headline awards were later cut down.

Masimo v. Apple

A California jury in November 2025 awarded Masimo Corp. $634 million after finding Apple infringed a pulse-oximetry patent used in Apple Watch blood-oxygen sensing. Apple said it will appeal, calling the verdict “contrary to the facts” and noting the patent at issue expired in 2022. The ITC denied Masimo’s request to reinstate an Apple Watch import ban in April 2026, and a related federal complaint was dismissed with prejudice that same month. Apple’s blood-oxygen feature remains disabled on watches sold in the U.S.⁷⁸

Samsung’s Run of Losses

Samsung has absorbed a remarkable series of large verdicts in the Eastern District of Texas. In 2025, Headwater Research won a $279 million wireless-technology verdict that Samsung settled in September.⁹ Pictiva Displays International secured a $191.4 million verdict for willful infringement of OLED display patents.¹⁰ Anonymous Media Research Holdings won $78.5 million in September 2025 over automatic content recognition technology.¹¹ Those come on top of 2024 verdicts of $142 million and $192 million and a 2023 computer-memory verdict of $303 million.

Headwater v. Verizon: $175 Million Vacated

Headwater, one of the most active patent plaintiffs in recent years, won a $175 million jury verdict against Verizon in summer 2025. In April 2026, Judge Rodney Gilstrap vacated the award, ruling that Verizon reasonably expected it would not be sued because it had invested in Headwater.¹²

Columbia v. Gen Digital: $185 Million Vacated

The Federal Circuit in March 2026 vacated a $185 million verdict Columbia University had won against Gen Digital (formerly Norton) over antivirus-detection patents. The court found the claims, which cover comparing software behavior against a model to detect malware, were directed to an abstract idea at step one of the Alice test. It also reversed damages tied to foreign sales, reasoning that software is not an infringing product until encoded on a computer, and computers located abroad do not count as domestic infringement. The case was remanded to determine whether the claims contain an “inventive concept” sufficient to survive eligibility review.¹³

Optis v. Apple: $300 Million Vacated

The Federal Circuit vacated a $300 million award Optis Cellular Technology had won against Apple over standard-essential LTE patents, identifying four reversible errors including a verdict form that violated Apple’s right to jury unanimity and an incorrect patent-eligibility analysis. An earlier jury had awarded $506.2 million before the district court ordered a new trial on damages.¹⁴

Sonos v. Google: $32.5 Million Verdict Revived

In August 2025, the Federal Circuit reversed a district court decision that had invalidated two Sonos smart-speaker patents and wiped out a $32.5 million jury verdict. Judge William Alsup had found the patents unenforceable because of a 13-year delay in Sonos’s patent filings. The Federal Circuit held that Google failed to show prejudice from the delay, noting that the applications were publicly available as early as 2013, before Google invested in the relevant products. The case was remanded. A Sonos spokesperson said the company hoped the ruling would “prompt Google to negotiate a fair license.”¹⁵

Filings Keep Climbing, and Texas Keeps Hosting Them

U.S. district court patent filings rose sharply in 2025, with reports placing the increase at between 12% and 19% year over year. Unified Patents counted 4,531 filings.¹⁶¹⁷ The Eastern District of Texas took back its spot as the busiest patent venue with roughly 28% of filings, followed by the Western District of Texas at about 12% and the District of Delaware at about 11%.

Non-practicing entities drove most of that volume. NPEs accounted for 55.4% of patent litigation in 2025, up from 51.8% the year before, and more than 90% of high-tech patent cases. NPE filings rose 21.6% year over year. Nine of the top ten patent plaintiffs were NPEs; entities controlled by Jeffrey Gross held three of those ten slots.¹⁶

Texas’s position is partly structural. A January 2023 administrative order by Chief Judge Gilstrap in the Eastern District’s Marshall Division sends roughly 90% of civil cases there to him, offering litigants predictability. Western District filings fell after case-assignment reforms moved cases away from Judge Alan Albright, and Delaware has slowed under new rules requiring plaintiffs to disclose litigation funding and corporate ownership.¹⁸

PTAB Pulls Back Under Director Squires

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board has been reshaped by policy changes under USPTO Director John Squires, who took office in September 2025. Squires revoked the delegation of IPR institution decisions and now personally decides each one. In October 2025, the USPTO proposed rules that would further restrict IPRs, including mandatory denial when a claim was previously upheld by another tribunal, and a requirement that petitioners abandon their Section 102/103 defenses in parallel proceedings.¹⁶

The effects are measurable. Procedural denials surged to 607 in 2025, up more than 630% from the prior year, and the institution rate against NPE-owned patents fell to 33.6% in the fourth quarter. Challengers have increasingly turned to ex parte reexamination. Total IPR petition filings for fiscal year 2025 reached 1,361, with an overall institution rate of 58% by petition.¹⁶¹⁹

Legal challenges have failed. In February 2026, the Federal Circuit held in Apple Inc. v. Squires that the Director’s discretionary-denial instructions under the NHK-Fintiv framework are “general statements of policy” exempt from APA notice-and-comment rulemaking.²⁰ Days later, the court denied Tesla’s mandamus petition raising similar arguments.²¹

Supreme Court Passes on Section 101 Eligibility

The question of what computer-implemented inventions qualify for patent protection under 35 U.S.C. §101 remains unsettled. USAA petitioned the Supreme Court in United Services Automobile Association v. PNC Bank (No. 25-853), asking it to review Federal Circuit decisions holding that patents on mobile check-deposit technology were directed to an “abstract idea.” USAA argued the Federal Circuit has incorrectly extended the abstract-idea prohibition to concrete technological processes and requires computer-implemented inventions to claim improvements in computer functionality itself to survive eligibility review.²² The American Intellectual Property Law Association filed in support, calling the Federal Circuit’s application of Alice/Mayo “unpredictable and overly broad.”²³ The Court denied certiorari on May 18, 2026, leaving the existing framework in place.

ITC Blocks Innoscience Chip Imports in Infineon Case

On May 7, 2026, the U.S. International Trade Commission issued a limited exclusion order and cease-and-desist orders against Innoscience, a Chinese gallium nitride semiconductor manufacturer, after finding it infringed an Infineon Technologies patent. The orders prohibit unlicensed imports of infringing GaN semiconductor devices, with a bond set at 100% of the value of infringing products during the 60-day presidential review period.²⁴ Innoscience said the finding was limited to “historical products” it has stopped making and that its current mainstream GaN products were not found to infringe.²⁵

Legislation in Play

Several patent bills are moving in Congress, though none have advanced far. The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act, reintroduced as S.1546 in the 119th Congress, would overhaul §101 standards; it has not cleared committee as of mid-2026.²⁶ The Prohibiting Adversarial Patents Act, a House proposal, would bar the USPTO from issuing or enforcing patents held by entities on federal national security watchlists, aimed at Chinese military-affiliated organizations. Senators Grassley and Klobuchar also introduced the American Innovation and Choice Online Act in June 2026, targeting digital platform practices.²⁷

1
Supreme Court of the United States. Hikma Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. v. Amarin Pharma, Inc., No. 24-889
2
Broad Institute. Statement and Background on CRISPR Patent Process
3
UC Berkeley News. Federal Appeals Court Sends CRISPR-Cas9 Patent Case Back to Patent Office for Reconsideration
4
UC Berkeley News. PTAB Sides With Broad Institute Over University of California on Patent Priority for Use of CRISPR in Eukaryotic Cells
5
Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. PTAB Again Rules in Favor of Broad in CRISPR-Cas9 Patent Dispute
6
LexisNexis. Lex Machina Patent Litigation Report Shows 22% Surge in Filings and Record $4.3B in Damages
7
Healthcare Dive. Masimo Apple Watch $634M Jury Award Patent Lawsuit
8
AppleInsider. Masimo’s Apple Watch Ban Complaint Dismissed by US District Court
9
Reuters. Samsung Settles Wireless Patent Case After $279M US Trial Loss
10
McKool Smith. Pictiva Displays International v. Samsung Verdict
11
AZA Law. Jury Awards AZA Client $78.5 Million in Patent Infringement Case Against Samsung
12
IP Fray. Judge Gilstrap Finds Verizon Reasonably Expected Not to Get Sued by Headwater, Vacating $175M Jury Verdict
13
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Trustees of Columbia University v. Gen Digital Inc., No. 2024-1243
14
Patently-O. Federal Circuit Vacates Optis v. Apple Verdict
15
Reuters. Sonos Wins Ruling to Revive US Patent Case Against Google
16
Unified Patents. Patent Dispute Report: 2025 in Review
17
Sterne Kessler. Litigation Report: Texas Dominates as District Court Patent Filings Surge by 19% in 2025
18
Patexia. Patent Litigation Intelligence Report 2026 Edition
19
USPTO. PTAB Trial Statistics FY2025 Q4
20
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Apple Inc. v. Squires, No. 24-1864
21
Fish & Richardson. Federal Circuit Denies All Mandamus Petitions Challenging Discretionary Denial Policies
22
SCOTUSblog. United Services Automobile Association v. PNC Bank N.A.
23
AIPLA. AIPLA Files Amicus Brief in USAA v. PNC Bank
24
U.S. International Trade Commission. Investigation No. 337-TA-1414 Notice
25
Semicone. ITC Affirms Infineon v. Innoscience GaN Patent Finding
26
Congress.gov. S.1546 – Patent Eligibility Restoration Act
27
IPWatchdog. IPWatchdog Patent News