On May 9, 2017, The Federal Circuit ruled in favor of Finnegan client FedEx, affirming a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) decision that invalidated a patent covering the monitoring of objects during shipment which was asserted against FedEx by IpVenture. The 2015 PTAB decision held that FedEx sufficiently demonstrated the more than two dozen claims of IpVenture's patent were unpatentable.
At the Federal Circuit, IpVenture argued that the PTAB erred in finding that the limitations of some of the claims at issue were disclosed in a patent by inventor James L. Richards. However, the Federal Circuit disagreed with IpVenture, stating that Richards' patent application disclosed a system for tracking packages which anticipated 16 claims of IpVenture’s patent and that the rest of the claims were obvious in light of a combination of Richards' application and two patents issued in 2005 and 2007.