Spotlight On Upcoming Oral Arguments – December 2021

The following telephone arguments will be available to the public live. Access information will be available by 9 AM ET each day of argument at: https://cafc.uscourts.gov/home/oral-argument/listen-to-oral-arguments/.

Thursday, December 9, 2021

Polycom, Inc. v. directPacket Research, Inc., No. 21-1744

directPacket sued Polycom alleging infringement of U.S. Patent No. 7,710,978, and Polycom petitioned for IPR. The Board invalidated most claims as obvious, but a handful of dependent claims survived.

On appeal, Polycom argues these dependent claims are likewise obvious over the prior art and the Board's decision must be reversed. According to Polycom, the Board applied an unduly narrow understanding of the law of obviousness, focusing inappropriately on minor differences between the prior art references to the exclusion of other motivations to combine them, including the nature of the problem to be solved. Polycom criticizes the Board for focusing on where a