User Manual was Publicly Accessible and Considered a Prior Art Reference

In Roku, Inc. v. Universal Electronics, Inc., the Federal Circuit held that a user manual was publicly accessible to be considered a prior art reference under 35 U.S.C. § 102, even though the website had several hundred user manuals because the user manuals were organized based on subject matter and would have been found by a person of ordinary skill in the art, exercising reasonable diligence.

Roku, Inc. owned U.S. Patent 8,378,875 (“the ’875 patent”), which was directed to methods of programming a universal remote control. Universal Electronics cited a manual to be used as prior art that was hosted on RemoteCentral.com, a remote control-focused hobbyist website founded in 1998. The manuals were grouped by brand, and the relevant RadioShack manual was the third entry in its brand section.

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“Board”) instituted review of all challenged claims and concluded that Universal had shown, by a preponderance of the evidence, that RadioShack was publicly accessible prior to the ’875 patent’s critical date, and was therefore, available as prior art and that the claims would have been obvious over the manual.

On appeal, the Federal Circuit affirmed. The court observed that while the website lacked keyword search capabilities, it allowed browsing by product category, covering only remote controls. The court also noted that the website had been cited in patents and technical articles before the critical date. The court noted that to be a “printed publication” under § 102, a reference must be publicly accessible such that a person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA), using reasonable diligence.

The court explained:

The court reasoned that a person of ordinary skill interested in universal remote controls would have known to look at the brand-specific section and would find the relevant manual within a reasonable number of entries. Thus, even though there was no full-text search capability, the subject matter focus, brand indexing, and limited volume (i.e., 329 manuals) made the website sufficiently navigable.

Therefore, the Federal Circuit affirmed the Board’s holding that the manual was prior art under 35 U.S.C. § 102.

Practice Tips

For Patent Application Drafters

1. Document real-world obstacles to discovery: If your invention differs from conventional products, consider discussing why such materials would not have been discoverable by a POSITA.
2. Anticipate the unexpected: Non-traditional sources (forums, enthusiast websites, GitHub wikis) may now be cited against your claims. Use claim language for at least some claims that requires features not typically documented in such materials.
3. When relying on technical advantages, distinguish or describe your claimed features from common configurations documented in hobbyist or product manuals.
4. Avoid claim language tied too closely to industry standards at least for some claims or risk having manuals, product sheets, or instructions found in publicly accessible archives used against you.

For Patent Litigators

1. Leverage focused repositories: Websites without keyword search may still qualify if the content pool is narrow, topical, and structured, especially by brand or product category.
2. Frame “reasonable diligence” by a POSITA in context: Courts do not require the best search tools, only reasonable navigability. Build evidence around how a POSITA would logically find the document.
3. Bolster accessibility arguments with citation evidence: Website information previously cited in patents, trade publications, or forums are strong candidates to be used as prior art.
4. Push back on assumptions that against public accessibility, focus on real-world user behavior—not hypothetical site features.

is a partner in Manatt, Phelps and Phillips' Intellectual Property Protection and Enforcement business unit and is the author of Patent Prosecution: Law, Practice, and Procedure, 2024 Edition, and Constructing and Deconstructing Patents (2d Edition 2016).

Roku, Inc. v. Universal Electronics, Inc., Civ. App. No. 2024-1188, 2025 WL 1693130 (Fed. Cir. June 17, 2025) (nonprecedential).

Id., slip op. at 3 (quoting Acceleration Bay, LLC v. Activision Blizzard Inc., 908 F.3d 765, 772 (Fed. Cir. 2018)).