An $11.5 million jury verdict against ecobee did not survive its trip to the Federal Circuit. On June 4, 2026, a panel of Judges Chen, Cunningham, and Stark vacated both the infringement and damages judgments in Ollnova Technologies Ltd. v. ecobee Technologies ULC, and remanded for a new trial. The defect was not in the technology or the proof; it was in the verdict form. The trial court, on its own initiative, gave the jury a single infringement question covering all four asserted patents at once — and that, the court held, created an unacceptable risk of a non-unanimous verdict.
The asserted patents — U.S. Patent Nos. 7,860,495; 8,264,371; 7,746,887; and 8,224,282 — all concern improvements to wireless communications in building-automation systems, the kind of HVAC and sensor networks ecobee's smart thermostats implement. The jury found ecobee infringed "at least one" of them without saying which, found the '282 patent's claims invalid, and awarded a $11.5 million lump sum. The problem, as the panel saw it, was structural: the form let each juror answer "yes" so long as he or she believed some claim of some patent was infringed, even if different jurors had different patents in mind.
"the verdict form needed to have included, at the very least, separate infringement questions for each asserted patent."— Federal Circuit, source
That holding follows directly from the court's 2025 decision in Optis Cellular Technology, LLC v. Apple Inc., which addressed a "materially identical" verdict form and found an abuse of discretion. Where multiple patents are asserted as distinct causes of action, a single combined infringement question violates the defendant's Seventh Amendment right to a unanimous verdict on each claim. The panel rejected Ollnova's argument that general unanimity instructions cured the problem — the jury could have followed those instructions and still understood it needed unanimity only on the question actually posed, the "ANY of the asserted claims" question. The court also rejected a forfeiture argument, finding ecobee preserved the issue by objecting that the form was "incomplete" and requesting that it "list each patent separately," even without using the word "unanimity." Because the damages award rested on the vacated infringement finding, it fell too.
The Alice step-two instruction the jury never got
The second major holding is a clean teaching case on how not to charge a jury on patent eligibility. The district court held at Alice step one that the '495 patent claims were directed to the abstract idea of "controlling generic 'components' using information from two separate sources," then sent step two to the jury. But neither the verdict form nor the instructions told the jury what that abstract idea was, much less that the abstract idea itself cannot supply the inventive concept. The jury was simply asked whether the claim limitations involved "only technology which a person of ordinary skill in the art would have considered to be well-understood, routine, and conventional."
That, the panel held, was reversible error and not harmless. Under BSG Tech and Trading Technologies, the step-two inquiry asks what is in the claims beyond the ineligible concept, and "a claimed invention's use of the ineligible concept to which it is directed cannot supply the inventive concept." Because the jury never learned the abstract idea, it could have rested its finding on the abstract idea itself — particularly since Ollnova's expert characterized the inventive concept (the "two modes" of control) in terms that closely tracked the abstract idea. The court vacated and remanded, instructing that if a jury again decides step two, it must be told the abstract idea and told that the abstract idea cannot supply the inventive concept.
What ecobee did not win
The cross-appeal was not a clean sweep. The panel affirmed the district court's denial of judgment as a matter of law that the '495 patent's claims are ineligible, holding that a reasonable jury could find the claimed dual-network architecture — where a first network operates "free of communications" from a second — was not well-understood, routine, or conventional. It also affirmed that the '887 and '371 patents are not directed to an abstract idea at step one. The '887 patent's polling-interval and conditional-transmission limitations recite "a technological solution to a technological problem," the court held, distinguishing Electric Power Group and Chamberlain, where claims merely collected, analyzed, or transmitted data without changing how the system worked.
The panel's reasoning on the '887 patent repays attention because it shows the line the court is drawing between eligible and ineligible network claims. Representative claim 1 recites a controller that polls a sensor only within a polling interval and transmits a reading only within a transmission interval and only when the sensed value falls outside a predetermined range. Those are not, the court held, abstract steps of collecting and communicating data; they are timing constraints and a conditional trigger that change when and how the system communicates, reducing traffic so that more devices can share a bandwidth-limited wireless network. Read against the specification's account of noisy, power-hungry building-automation networks, that is a technological solution to a technological problem. The court rejected ecobee's reliance on Trinity Info Media, distinguishing a "predetermined threshold" used merely to perform mental-style matching from one that changes how a system actually transmits information. The takeaway for drafters is concrete: operational limitations that alter system behavior survive step one in a way that result-oriented "collect, analyze, transmit" claims do not.
For software-eligibility practitioners, the case is a reminder that Alice still decides these disputes and that the doctrine has procedural teeth at trial: step one is a court question that must frame step two, and a step-two charge that omits the abstract idea is structurally defective. For trial lawyers asserting multiple patents, the verdict-form holding is now a hard rule — separate the infringement question by patent or risk losing the judgment, no matter how large. Ollnova will get a new trial on infringement and damages, and a properly instructed step-two question on the '495 patent. The two eligibility wins on the '887 and '371 patents, however, narrow the issues ecobee can relitigate.