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Brumfield v. IBG: Foreign Revenue and U.S. Patents

Federal Circuit, decided 27 March 2024. Read from the opinion; quotations verified against the court's text.

Read this with Columbia v. Gen Digital. Brumfield opens the route to foreign damages. Columbia shows a patent owner losing it on a jury instruction, with the doctrinal question expressly reserved. Read alone, this page says U.S. patents reach foreign sales, which overstates a holding that still requires causal proof.
Holding

On March 27, 2024 the Federal Circuit held that the Supreme Court's WesternGeco framework, and "its conclusions about what is a domestic rather than extraterritorial application of § 284, must apply to a reasonable-royalty case," while cautioning that this does not erase the differences between lost-profits and reasonable-royalty damages.

U.S. patents are territorial, but the Supreme Court held in WesternGeco that a patent owner can recover foreign losses caused by domestic infringement. That case involved lost profits.

This decision extends the framework to reasonable royalties, which is the damages theory almost every software case uses.

The court was careful to add that the two kinds of damages remain different in how they are proved. For a company whose product is used worldwide, this is the decision that makes foreign revenue potentially reachable, and the causal proof is still required.

What This Case Is Not

"U.S. patents now cover foreign sales" is wrong. The holding is that a framework applies. The causation still has to be proved, and the specific route remains untested after Columbia, where it failed on a jury instruction rather than on the doctrine.
  • It does not say whether your foreign revenue is exposed.
  • It does not hold that U.S. patents reach foreign sales. It holds that a framework for analyzing them applies.
  • It does not erase the differences between lost profits and reasonable royalties. The court said so directly.

Educational, not legal advice. Litigation strategy and exposure are determinations for counsel with the actual facts.

Sources