Patent claims are generally given their plain and ordinary meaning, which is the meaning that a skilled artisan would ascribe in context of the claim, specification, and prosecution history. Kyocera Senco Indus. Tools Inc. v. ITC, 22 F.4th 1369, 1378 (Fed. Cir. 2022).

In FMC Corp. v. Sharda USA, LLC, No. 24-2335, __ F.4th __ (Fed. Cir. Aug. 1, 2025), the Federal Circuit held that “composition” was not limited to stable compositions. 

Although the provisional application for an insecticidal composition had contained various teachings about stability and stable compositions, the common specification of the asserted patents omitted those teachings. Instead, the later asserted patents' written description was altered from the provisional application "by deleting every single one of the many references contained in the '979 provisional application to stability and stable compositions." Having "culled all such references from the common specification," neither “stable” nor “stability,” nor any variation thereof, appear anywhere in the common specification. The non-provisional patent applications that matured into the asserted patents did not simply carry over and maintain the same specification from the earlier-filed provisional application.

     Under the circumstances, we see little difference between this case and DDR Holdings, LLC v. Priceline.com LLC, 122 F.4th 911 (Fed. Cir. 2024). In DDR, the provisional application defined “merchants,” in relevant part, as “producers, manufacturers, and select distributors of products or services.” Id. at 915 (citation omitted). But the patent-at-issue defined “merchants” as “the producers, distributors, or resellers of the goods.” Id. at 915–16 (citation omitted). “Notably missing from the patent's specification, however, [was] any mention of services in relation to merchants.” Id. at 916. We found that deletion of “services” “highly significant,” explaining that a skilled artisan would understand that “progression between the provisional application and the patent specification to indicate an evolution of the applicant's intended meaning of the claim term.” Id.

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. . . A skilled artisan would find that evolution meaningful: every textual reference in the provisional application that a skilled artisan might reasonably have relied upon for interpreting “composition” as covering only stable compounds was removed from the asserted patents. A skilled artisan, in light of such deletions in the prosecution history, would not understand “composition” as claimed in the asserted patents to cover only stable formulations. See MPHJ Tech. Invs., LLC v. Ricoh Ams. Corp., 847 F.3d 1363, 1369 (Fed. Cir. 2017) (“In this case, it is the deletion from the . . . [p]rovisional application that contributes understanding of the intended scope of the final application.”); Finjan LLC v. ESET, LLC, 51 F.4th 1377, 1383 (Fed. Cir. 2022) (“The use of a restrictive term in an earlier application does not reinstate that term in a later patent that purposely deletes the term, even if the earlier patent is incorporated by reference.”).

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. . . [O]ur reasoning in DDR did not turn on whether the deletions there would narrow or broaden the claim scope. See DDR, 122 F.4th at 915–17. Rather, our holding turned on the existence of meaningful alterations the patent owner made between the content of the provisional application and the patent-at-issue. And here, as explained above, FMC amended the common specification of the asserted patents, deleting every reference to the terms “stable,” “stability,” and variations thereof. The '979 provisional application, accordingly, cannot limit “composition” in the asserted patents to only stable compositions.

While a claim term typically is interpreted consistently across a patent family when the patents “derive from the same parent application,” see SightSound Techs., LLC v. Apple Inc., 809 F.3d 1307, 1316 (Fed. Cir. 2015), the Court held "that principle does not hold true when the patent owner, like FMC here, materially alters the specification of some of the members of the patent family in a manner that directs a skilled artisan to interpret the claim term differently." 

The Federal Circuit concluded that the district court erred by imposing a stability requirement onto the term “composition” and instead should give “composition” its plain and ordinary meaning.

Update: Professor Crouch noted that this was an expansion of the Federal Circuit's doctrine associated with "using minor changes in the specification [to] justify differing claim construction across a patent family" which is "helpful for careful patent attorneys, but also requires care."