WASHINGTON – A federal appellate court on Wednesday handed victory to Playboy Entrprises Inc. and MindGeek SARL in a long-running dispute about an audio/video transmission patent for mobile devices.

In its precedent-setting decision, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit invalidated part of U.S. Patent Number 7,548,875, owned by mobile technology development company Skky Inc. of Wayzata, Minn.

The 2009 patent describes a method for delivering high-quality audio and video to wireless devices. According to Skky’s legal briefs, technology extant prior to its patent allowed mobile devices to download and play only rudimentary graphics and sounds.

In July 2013, Skky filed a spate of lawsuits accusing numerous companies of violating its patent. Playboy and MindGeek fought back, challenging what the companies called vagueness in the patent’s terminology and what they considered Skky’s unsupportable claim to have intellectual property rights in so-called “obvious” technology — technology that would have been obvious at the time of the patent application.

The U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board agreed with Playboy and Mindgeek in January 2016.

Skky appealed, asserting in its petition that “the PTAB erred in its determination that [the challenged claims] were obvious … and thus unpatentable.” The board’s decision, the brief further noted, was based on “fundamental misunderstanding of the claimed invention.”

The Federal Circuit disagreed.

“[T]he board applied the correct claim constructions; accordingly, we are not convinced by Skky’s arguments based on its constructions,” the Federal Circuit panel concluded, adding Skky’s “general challenges to the board’s obviousness analysis” were “not persuasive.”

The case is Skky Inc. v. MindGeek SARL et al., case number 16-2018.