In its precedential July 2, 2026 decision in TrackTime, LLC v. Amazon.com Services LLC, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit vacated a Delaware district court ruling that had found certain “executable program code” limitations indefinite and remanded for further proceedings. The Federal Circuit did not hold that such code language necessarily supplies structure or automatically avoids 35 U.S.C. § 112(f). Instead, it faulted the lower court’s analysis for treating the issue too mechanically and directed a more contextual inquiry into the full claim language, the recited function, and how a person of ordinary skill in the art would understand the disputed terminology.
For software and data-processing patents, the practical message is that §112(f) and indefiniteness disputes may turn heavily on the evidentiary record rather than on labels such as “code” or “logic” alone. Expert testimony and evidence showing whether relevant practitioners would recognize the term as naming a sufficiently definite structure can be important. Patent drafters should therefore avoid assuming that “executable program code” is a safe harbor; describing the operations performed, their technical relationships, and identifiable implementations more concretely may reduce later claim-construction risk and strengthen the record if validity is challenged.
