US Supreme Court won't hear patent appeal against Apple, Google, LG

LG Electronics

17/11/2025 16:12

By Blake Brittain

WASHINGTON, Nov 17 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up a case involving the right to challenge expired patents, leaving in place a win for Apple AAPL.O, Google GOOGL.O and LG Electronics 066570.KS.

The justices declined to hear an appeal by Gesture Technology Partners, which was challenging a decision to invalidate a patent that it had accused the technology companies of infringing.

Gesture's attorney and spokespeople for Apple and LG did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A Google spokesperson declined to comment.

Inventor Timothy Pryor formed Gesture in 2013. Pryor owns patents related to motion-sensing and other technologies that he began developing in the 1990s.

Gesture sued the tech companies in 2021 for allegedly infringing a patent covering camera technology used in cell phones. Gesture said the companies violated its rights before the patent expired in 2020, and that its validity had not been challenged while it was active.

Apple, Google and LG filed petitions to invalidate the patent at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's Patent Trial and Appeal Board later in 2021. The board's patent review process is particularly popular with tech companies that are frequently targeted in infringement lawsuits.

The board canceled most of the patent, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit declared the entire patent invalid in January.

The Supreme Court has previously held that the board can review active patents because they implicate public rights. Gesture told the Supreme Court that expired patents no longer implicate public rights and can only be reviewed by federal courts under the U.S. Constitution.

The tech companies and the USPTO filed separate briefs asking the high court to let the Federal Circuit's ruling stand and arguing that the review of expired patents still involves public rights.

 (Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington)