The Supreme Court today declined to review an appellate court ruling in favor of Sprint Communications Co. LP in a VoIP (voice-over-Internet protocol) patent dispute with Cox Communications, Inc. The high court’s ruling in “Cox Communications, Inc., et al. v. Sprint Communications Co. et al.” (case 16-1106) leaves in place a 2016 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (case 16-1013 at the Federal Circuit), which reversed a federal district court ruling.

The patents dealt with the hand-off between narrow-band or circuit-switched networks and broadband or packet-switched networks using a “processing system,” and the dispute revolved around whether that term is definite enough to make the extent of the claims clear.  The Federal Circuit had held that, “read in light of the specification and the prosecution history,” the phrase does not prevent the claims “from informing those skilled in the art about the scope of the invention with reasonable certainty.”

Courtesy TRDaily