Belden Inc. v. Berk-Tek LLC
Addressing issues of obviousness and procedural issues related
to the use of declarations, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
Federal Circuit affirmed in part and reversed in part a decision by
the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB or Board), finding that all
claims of the patent at issue were invalid. Belden Inc. v.
Berk-Tek LLC, Case No. 14-1575 (Fed. Cir., Nov. 5, 2015)
(Taranto, J.).
Appellant Belden owns the patent at issue, which relates to a
method of producing a transmission cable. Petitioner and
cross-appellant Berk-Tek challenged the validity of the
patent's claims in an inter partes review (IPR),
arguing that they are obvious in view of a combination of prior art
references. The Board ultimately concluded that some of the claims
were obvious, but that other claims were patentable. Specifically
the Board found that certain dependent claims relating to twisted
pairs of conductors were patentable because Berk-Tek had
