On August 4, 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) affirmed a Delaware district court’s decision in the matter of Goda Kaisha IP Bridge v. TCL Communications Technology Holding Ltd., in which a jury decided that TCL’s LTE standard-compliant devices infringed upon IP Bridge’s patented technology related to “methods for providing control signaling” in communication systems, and awarded IP Bridge $950,000 in damages.
TCL appealed, arguing that the question of whether all implementations of an industry standard infringe the patent claims was improperly decided by the jury rather than being determined by the court. However, the CAFC concluded that questions regarding “whether asserted claims are in fact essential to all implementations of an industry standard” should be resolved by a jury in the context of its infringement analysis rather than by a court during claim construction.
