On 26 August 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit partially vacated a Patent Trial and Appeal Board final written decision in Zilkr Cloud Technologies, LLC v. Cisco Systems, Inc., rejecting the Board’s construction of “request to provision” and “activate.” The PTAB had read those terms broadly enough to encompass both adding a new service and managing an existing subscription. The Federal Circuit instead relied on the claims as a whole and the specification’s repeated, consistent usage, which tied “activate” to the addition of a new service and distinguished activation from later management or access. The court remanded on those constructions while leaving the Board’s treatment of another term, “utilized by,” intact. The disposition is expressly nonprecedential, so it should not be presented as a new binding rule for all IPRs.
The practical point is narrower but still important. IPR proceedings filed on or after 13 November 2018 have already used the federal-court Phillips claim-construction standard rather than the broadest reasonable interpretation approach. Zilkr therefore matters less as a change in the governing standard than as a reminder about how intrinsic evidence can limit seemingly broad language. Repeated and consistent use across the specification may carry substantial weight even without a dictionary-style definition or an express disclaimer. Patent owners should map that internal consistency carefully when defending claim scope in IPR, while petitioners face greater risk when a broad reading depends on abstract ordinary meaning but sits uneasily with the patent’s own usage.
