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SRI v. Cisco: What Willful Infringement Means

Federal Circuit, decided 28 September 2021. Read from the opinion; quotations verified against the court's text.

Read this with Columbia v. Gen Digital. This sets a low bar for willfulness. Columbia holds that clearing it decides nothing about punishment. Read alone, this one says being found willful means paying multiples.
Holding

On September 28, 2021 the Federal Circuit reinstated a jury's willful infringement finding, applying the standard that under Halo "the concept of 'willfulness' requires a jury to find no more than deliberate or intentional infringement," while confirming that "an award of enhanced damages does not necessarily flow from a willfulness finding."

Willful infringement can triple a damages award, so what counts as willful matters enormously to any company that might be accused.

This decision states the standard plainly: willfulness requires no more than deliberate or intentional infringement. It is not a heightened test requiring egregious conduct. But the court also confirms that finding willfulness does not automatically produce enhanced damages, which remain a separate discretionary decision.

What made this infringement deliberate is worth noting: there was no evidence of copying and none of concealment. Cisco lost because it had no reasonable defense, having argued for a claim requirement the court had already rejected and against a fact its own internal documents established.

What This Case Is Not

This case does not answer "should we read patents?" The tempting headline for an engineering audience is "reading patents does not make you willful." This opinion does not say that. It states what willfulness requires and says nothing about knowledge acquisition or deliberate ignorance. Any page answering the reading-patents question from this case is going beyond it.
  • It does not hold that enhanced damages follow from willfulness. The opposite, explicitly.
  • It does not address whether or how a company should review third-party patents.
  • It does not tell you whether any particular conduct is willful.

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

Sources