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Columbia v. Gen Digital: Claims, Not the Specification

Federal Circuit, No. 2024-1243, decided 11 March 2026. A separate opinion issued the same day under the same caption, No. 2024-1244, is the Quinn Emanuel privilege and contempt appeal, not this one. Read from the opinion; quotations verified against the court's text.

Read this with SRI v. Cisco. SRI sets the willfulness bar low. This decision holds that clearing it decides nothing about punishment. Read alone, this one says enhancement is nearly unobtainable.

And with Brumfield v. IBG, for the foreign-damages half. Brumfield opens the route to foreign revenue. This decision is where a patent owner lost it, on a jury instruction rather than on the doctrine, which the court expressly left undecided.
Holding

On March 11, 2026 the Federal Circuit vacated a $185,112,727 judgment against Norton's parent company, holding that Columbia's anti-malware claims were abstract at Alice step one because every technological improvement it pointed to lived in the specification rather than in the claims, and separately holding that copies of software created on customers' computers abroad were made outside the United States and so cannot support domestic damages. The judgment was vacated, not reversed outright: step two was remanded for the district court to consider in the first instance.

Columbia won $185 million from a jury against the maker of Norton antivirus. The Federal Circuit took it away. Two holdings matter to software companies.

First, every improvement Columbia identified, selective emulation, diversified models, distributed sensors, was real and described in the patent, and none of it was in the claims. The sentence to remember: it cannot be said that claims are directed to a technological improvement when nothing in the claims requires the steps necessary to make it.

Second, for a company selling downloadable software internationally, the copy a customer's machine creates abroad is made abroad, so those sales do not support U.S. damages on these claim types.

The court also vacated the enhanced damages and fees, holding that a district court must weigh the defenses a defendant lost, and that repeating an argument is not the kind of litigation misconduct that justifies enhancement.

What This Case Is Not

"No damages for foreign software sales" is wrong twice over. The holding is about where copies are made under these claim types, not a general rule about foreign sales. And the causation route was left undecided because of a jury-instruction failure. Reporting the outcome without that waiver misstates where the law actually sits.
  • It does not hold that these patents are invalid. The claims were held abstract at step one and step two went back to the district court undecided.
  • It does not hold that foreign software revenue is never recoverable.
  • It does not make enhancement unobtainable. It holds that a court must weigh the whole circumstances.
  • The specification-versus-claims point carries a live tension with other decisions and should not be quoted for a general proposition about where an improvement must appear.

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

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