In Dolby Laboratories Licensing Corporation v. Unified Patents, LLC, No. 2023-2110 (Fed. Cir. June 5, 2025), the Federal Circuit dismissed Dolby's appeal of a final written decision of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board for lack of Article III standing, determining that Dolby had not established a sufficient injury in fact. Before the Board, Dolby argued that nine other entities should have been named as real parties in interest (RPIs) after the Board instituted review with Unified Patents as the sole RPI. In the appeal, Dolby challenged the Board's refusal to adjudicate the RPI dispute. Unified Patents and the Patent Office, as intervenor, challenged Dolby's standing to appeal.
Dolby argued that it had standing for three reasons: (1) it was a "dissatisfied" party having a statutory right to appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 319; (2) it was harmed by the violation of its informational right to know all RPIs in IPR proceedings under 35 U.S.C. § 312(a)(2); and (3) it was harmed in various ways from the Board's refusal to adjudicate the RPI dispute.
The Federal Circuit rejected each of Dolby's theories. The court stated that the statutory right of a dissatisfied party to appeal a decision under the AIA does not eliminate the injury-in-fact requirement for Article III standing. The court also clarified that there is no freestanding right to RPI information outside of IPR proceedings and emphasized that Dolby's alleged harms were too speculative to establish Article III standing because there was no evidence of conflicts of interest, license agreements, or threatened litigation.
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