The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a Patent Trial & Appeal Board decision finding that Google failed to establish unpatentability of challenged claims because the patent owner successfully antedated the asserted prior art reference using inventor testimony corroborated by metadata. Google LLC v. Valtrus Innovations Ltd., Case No. 2024-1945 (Fed Cir. Oct. 19, 2026) (Hughes, Cunningham, Burroughs, JJ.)

Valtrus owns a patent directed to methods for merging search results from multiple search engines. Google petitioned for inter partes review (IPR) of the patent, asserting four grounds for obviousness. Each ground relied on the same primary prior art reference, Bushee. Although Bushee was filed about five weeks before the application for Valtrus’ patent, the patent was governed by pre-America Invents Act (AIA) law. Pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 102(e) permitted Valtrus to antedate Bushee by establishing conception before Bushee’s filing date and reasonably continuous diligence from just before that date until Valtrus filed its patent application.

Valtrus submitted an inventor declaration, original invention disclosure documents, and associated Microsoft Word metadata to establish conception before Bushee’s filing date. The Board found that the disclosure documents and metadata corroborated the inventor’s testimony, and that Valtrus had demonstrated reasonably continuous diligence through the filing of its patent application. The Board determined that Bushee was not prior art under pre-AIA § 102(e) and that Google had failed to establish the unpatentability of any challenged claim. Google appealed.

Reviewing the Board’s legal conclusions de novo and its factual findings for substantial evidence, the Federal Circuit affirmed. Google argued that the invention disclosure documents and accompanying metadata could not independently corroborate the inventor’s testimony because both were entirely within the inventor’s control. The Federal Circuit disagreed, relying on its 2025 decision in Global Health Solutions v. Selner, which recognized that automatically generated metadata is independent of an inventor’s own statements and documents. Assuming without deciding the metadata’s authenticity, the Court explained that the Microsoft Word metadata was not authored by the inventor and contained authorship and timestamp information consistent with his asserted conception date. The Court distinguished such metadata from unwitnessed inventor-created documents, which cannot independently corroborate conception testimony, and noted Google’s acknowledgment at oral argument that corroboration need not come from a human source. Applying the rule of reason, the Court concluded that substantial evidence supported the Board’s finding that the disclosure documents and metadata corroborated the inventor’s testimony.

Google also challenged the Board’s finding that the inventor exercised reasonably continuous diligence in reducing the invention to practice. The Federal Circuit explained that although reasonable diligence must be established throughout the critical period, it need not be perfectly continuous, and evidence of activity on each day of the diligence period is unnecessary if the record provides a satisfactory explanation for any gaps. Google disputed only the approximately 11 business days between August 8 and August 27, 2001, when the patent application was filed. The Court found substantial evidence supporting diligence during that period, including the time required to mail the last inventor’s signed [...]

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