I have read a lot of the comments below, and it seems people have some basic misunderstandings about what happened.

This is truly a nothing case. Almost guaranteed cert denied.

This case doesn’t involve one court undermining the judgment of another court, or any appellate courts considering issues on its own, or any separation of powers issues. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b) allowed the Sprint district court to set aside its final judgment based on new evidence, intervening change in law, or a number of other discretionary factors. This is nothing new; Rule 60(b) has been in the Federal Rules since they were adopted in 1938, and that rule merely memorialized the power that courts of common law for centuries had to set aside otherwise “final” judgments in exceptional circumstances.

Sprint filed such a motion after it exhausted all of its appeals, and the same district court that issued the judgment against Sprint, set aside its own judgment under its discretionary authority under Rule 60(b). Prism appealed that decision, and the CAFC affirmed, finding no abuse of discretion. End of story. There is nothing more to the decision, procedurally, than that. Prism’s cert petition tries mightily to transform this procedural ruling into something bigger, but it isn’t.

It’s simply a case-specific application of well-established federal procedural rules.

People for decades have been using Rule 60(b) motions to set aside infringement judgments when the patents-in-suit were later found invalid in later proceedings, whether those later proceedings were the result of other court judgments or reexaminations. District courts have tons of discretion here, but generally, will set aside otherwise “final” judgments of infringement so long as too much time hasn’t gone by. Here, the district court would have probably been within its discretion had it chosen to grant or deny Sprint’s motion.

This case does not involve separation of powers issues, appellate courts raising new issues on appeal, one court undermining the final judgment of another, or any of the other exotic stuff in the comments below.

And people misunderstand Dennis’ comment that Sprint “took pains to slow-walk its post-appeal activity (request for rehearing and petition for certiorari) so that the case still had some life by the time the T-Mobile decision was released.” This had nothing to do with whether the decision in Sprint was “final.” By the time Sprint filed its 60(b) motion, the judgment was final. The true reason for Sprint’s slow-walk was judgment enforcement issues. Sprint no doubt had an appellate bond posted, which stopped enforcement of the $30 million judgment against it, pending the appeal. If Sprint had been forced to cough up those funds in judgment enforcement proceedings, and THEN filed its Rule 60(b) motion, it would have been too late. Prism was a patent troll that would have dissipated those funds instantly to third parties such that the funds could not easily be recovered. By slow-walking the appeal, they didn’t give Prism enough time to enforce its judgment before Sprint’s Rule 60(b) motion was brought.