⚖ Oral Arguments, with Context

The Federal Circuit hears Digital Broadcasting Solutions versus Dish Network, a dispute about patents for recording television and controlling playback. The patents describe recorders that can require a program to be played with its commercials during an initial period, while allowing a different playback choice later. One patent also addresses receiving several programs at once on a single transmission channel, with one command instructing the recorder to receive and store them. Dish challenged the patents at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board using earlier technology. The Board found all challenged claims of one patent unpatentable, and all but one of the challenged claims in the other. Digital Broadcasting appeals its losses; Dish cross-appeals the claim it failed to defeat. So each side is defending part of the Board's work and challenging another part. Digital Broadcasting will argue that the earlier references do not establish the required features and that the petition did not properly present one of the theories the Board accepted. Dish will argue that the combination must be read as a whole, and that the surviving claim requires an obvious timing choice the Board did not adequately analyze. That claim concerns information identifying where commercials start and end, received after the video has already been stored. Sending information on a separate channel is not necessarily the same as sending it later. Listen for the difference between finding a feature expressly described in an earlier document and explaining why it would have been obvious, and whether that explanation was actually presented to the Board.

Digital Broadcasting Solutions, LLC v. DISH Network L.L.C. (No. 25-1364) — U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, argued November 4, 2026.