Evolved Wireless, LLC v. Samsung Electronics America, Inc.

Evolved Wireless, LLC v. Samsung Electronics America, Inc. The Federal Circuit affirmed across the board: substantial evidence supported the jury's noninfringement verdict under Evolved's standards-based LTE theory, the Qualcomm license survived termination and continued to bar claims against Qualcomm-chip products, and substantial evidence supported the written-description verdict. The court also held Evolved forfeited its challenge to the jury instruction requiring proof that every LTE implementation infringed. For standards-based infringement theories, the patentee must be prepared to prove the standard necessarily practices the claims, and post-trial challenges to that legal framework may be forfeited if not preserved. Affirmed the grant of partial summary judgment for Samsung, the denial of Evolved's motion for a new infringement trial, and the denial of Samsung's JMOL motion on written description. Evolved relied on an LTE-standard-based infringement case for the non-Qualcomm products, mapping the asserted claims to the LTE handover procedure rather than proving product-specific operation. Samsung presented evidence that LTE-compliant handover could assign the same preamble to multiple devices and still allow collisions, supporting the jury's finding that the standard did not necessarily require the claimed dedicated preamble. The court rejected Evolved's belated challenge to the standards-essential infringement instruction because Evolved did not object to the instruction or raise the issue post-trial. For Qualcomm-chip products, the court held that the LG-Qualcomm agreement and amendments, read under California contract law, preserved Qualcomm's covenants/license rights despite the agreement's 2018 termination and the later patent transfer. On Samsung's cross-appeal, expert testimony that the parent specification's disclosure of signature/preamble information supported the claimed dedicated preamble and index of the dedicated preamble provided substantial evidence for the jury's written-description finding. infringement § 112(a) waiver / forfeiture non-precedential infringement § 112(a) waiver / forfeiture non-precedential infringement § 112(a) waiver / forfeiture non-precedential