PIPLI to Federal Circuit: Injunctions Are Not Automatic in Patent Cases
Alex Moss | September 21, 2026
Collision Communications, Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co. comes to the Federal Circuit after a jury in the Eastern District of Texas found Samsung willfully infringed patents owned by Collision—a licensing entity that acquired the patents from a defense contractor. After the verdict, Collision sought an injunction banning Samsung from making, using, or selling products that practice the patents. Because the patents cover wireless connectivity technology, the injunction could have reached a vast range of products. And because Collision doesn’t make or sell anything, the value of an injunction lay in leverage—the power to extract payment beyond the $445 million judgment it had already won.
Judge Gilstrap declined to enter a permanent injunction. Collision appealed.
On appeal, Collision and its amici argue that traditional equity practice gave patent holders a presumptive right to an injunction once infringement of a valid patent was established—and that eBay left that presumption undisturbed. They rest that claim on the practice of an English court between 1660 and 1800 and on a single study of nineteenth century U.S. decisions.
The Public Interest Patent Law Institute, represented pro bono by O’Melveny & Myers, has filed an amicus brief supporting Samsung. Our brief takes the historical argument on its own terms and shows the American record establishes practically the opposite of what Collision’s amici contend.
I. Congress did not open equity to patent holders—and when it did, it did not guarantee injunctions.
Congress didn’t permit patent holders to sue in equity at all until 1819. No right to sue in equity meant no hope of an injunction. Congress declined to give patent holders that right twice more, in 1793 and 1800. For twenty-nine years, a patent holder could only sue at law, where juries decided damages.
When Congress finally allowed patent suits in equity in 1819, it did so on the courts’ own terms—relief could issue only “according to the course and principles of the courts of equity.” That instruction survives today, in substance, in 35 U.S.C. § 283. And the courts that received it held, repeatedly, that patent owners were not guaranteed injunctive relief. By 1905, a leading treatise stated it as settled: where the plaintiff “merely licenses his patent for fixed license fee,” damages are ascertainable, and the defendant can pay, “relief by injunction will be refused.”
Patent holders did come to equity in greater numbers after 1840—but the draw was procedural, not a new entitlement to injunctive relief. Long enforcement campaigns produced litigation records that let patent holders bypass a jury trial on validity. And in 1870, Congress expanded the monetary relief available in equity, not the injunctive relief. The shift in numbers reflected strategy, not a jurisprudential turn toward presumptive injunctions.
II. The study Collision’s amici rely on does not establish a historical presumption.
The study reports a 91.2% grant rate for permanent injunctions—but only in cases where the court had already found a valid patent infringed. Across all bills seeking permanent injunctions, the grant rate was 66.9%. The study’s own author expressly declined to draw the inference amici now press, stating he was “not making any statistical claims about legal practices or litigation rates.” And the dataset ends in 1882, before courts began applying Root v. Lake Shore—which held that equitable relief in patent cases “ordinarily is incidental to some other equity” and must “rest upon its own particular circumstances.”
What the history actually shows is that the Supreme Court in eBay faithfully applied longstanding equitable principles. The Patent Law Experts amici don’t dispute that Robert Bosch forecloses their position. They ask that it be “clarified or overruled.” But their disagreement runs to eBay itself—which places the burden on the patent holder to demonstrate each factor. That relief isn’t available in this appeal.
III. The public interest weighs against an injunction that would serve only as leverage.
Under eBay, patent holders must show that an injunction would not disserve the public interest. Where a patent holder practices the invention, that showing is straightforward—an injunction changes who supplies the public, not whether the public is supplied. But where the patent holder makes nothing, nothing replaces what the injunction removes.
Here, the accused feature is in 270 million phones in this country. Disabling it would prevent users from connecting to carrier cellular networks. The effect on the public goes far beyond what these patents claim as improvements to multiuser detection—one function among thousands in a modern cellular device. An injunction wouldn’t protect Collision’s market position; it has none. It would give Collision leverage unrelated to what its patents contribute, operating on a thirty day clock to force redesign of a receiver function across an entire product line.
Justice Kennedy described this situation exactly: where “the patented invention is but a small component of the product the companies seek to produce and the threat of an injunction is employed simply for undue leverage in negotiations, legal damages may well be sufficient to compensate for the infringement and an injunction may not serve the public interest.”
The Federal Circuit should affirm the denial of the permanent injunction and confirm eBay’s four factor inquiry—along with the longstanding equitable principles that inquiry reflects.
PIPLI is deeply grateful to Shawnna M. Yashar, William M. Fink, Elizabeth N. Sneitzer, and Brooke M. Wilner of O’Melveny & Myers LLP for their representation.