Patent owners who enforce their rights in litigation routinely confront a hard truth: a patent’s scope is defined by the precise wording of its claims, not by the broader range of technology described in the specification. A recent nonprecedential decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, Dynapass IP Holdings LLC v. Bank of America Corporation (June 11, 2026), reinforces this principle and offers a cautionary lesson for technology companies and inventors about the lasting consequences of claim drafting decisions.
Dynapass owns a patent directed to user authentication. In practical terms, the patent describes a two-factor authentication method in which a one-time token is delivered to a user’s mobile device and combined with a passcode to form a password. Dynapass accused Bank of America’s mobile banking application of infringing the patent. The case turned on the meaning of a single claim phrase: “receiving the password.” The district court construed that phrase to require receipt of a complete password already generated from both the passcode and the token, thereby excluding any system in which the passcode and token are submitted to the network separately. Based on that construction, the parties stipulated to non-infringement, and the district court dismissed the case. The Federal Circuit affirmed.
The outcome is especially instructive because the patent’s own specification described an alternative embodiment in which the passcode and token were, in fact, submitted separately. Dynapass argued that its claims should be read broadly enough to cover that disclosed alternative. The court disagreed. It explained that the claim language followed a deliberate sequence (generating a password from the passcode and token, setting that password, and then receiving it), which required a fully formed password to be received from the user. Because the patentee’s chosen words did not reach the separate-submission alternative, the mere presence of that embodiment in the written description could not stretch the claims to cover it. As the court reaffirmed, where a patent repeatedly and consistently characterizes a term in a particular way, the term will be construed accordingly.
For businesses that build and rely on patent portfolios, the practical lessons are clear. A specification’s disclosure does not rescue claims that were never drafted to capture it, so claims should be written to affirmatively cover every embodiment and design variation the inventor contemplates, including alternatives mentioned only in passing in the written description. A well-structured set of independent and dependent claims should reach different implementations and varying degrees of breadth, reducing the risk that one narrowing construction defeats an entire infringement theory. Companies should also periodically review their key patents, ideally well before asserting them, to confirm that the claim language actually aligns with the products and processes they hope to reach. In patent litigation, proactive and litigation-minded claim drafting remains one of the most cost-effective ways to preserve enforceable rights and avoid an early, dispositive loss at the claim construction stage.
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