Appellant TCL COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY HOLDINGS LIMITED loses at CAFC

The outcome:



In this appeal, the parties dispute whether the patentee was permitted to prove that the Appellants’ products infringed the claims of the asserted patent by showing
that: (1) the patent claims are essential to mandatory aspects of the Long-Term Evolution (“LTE”) standard; and (2)
the accused products practice that standard. Appellants
assert that, if Appellee wanted to resort to that theory of
infringement, it was required to ask the court to decide the
question of the claims’ essentiality to the standard in the
claim construction context and that the court needed to decide that question as a matter of law. Unsurprisingly, Appellee disagrees. We find no error in the submission of
these questions to the jury in the context of an infringement trial.




AND


Accordingly, we reject TCL’s reading of Fujitsu.
Where, as here, there are material disputes of fact regarding whether asserted claims are in fact essential to all implementations of an industry standard, the question of
essentiality must be resolved by the trier of fact in the context of an infringement trial. Viewed through this lens, we
find that substantial evidence fully supports the jury’s infringement verdict