Federal Circuit Dismisses You Map's Appeal in Snap's IPR on the Zoom-Level Social Map Patent.

The dismissal

In You Map, Inc. v. Snap Inc., No. 2026-2026, an appeal from the Patent Trial and Appeal Board in IPR2022-00568, the Federal Circuit issued a nonprecedential order on October 26, 2026, stating that, the parties having so agreed, the proceeding is dismissed under Fed. R. App. P. 42(b), and that each side shall bear its own costs. The order issued as the mandate the same day. You Map, Inc. is the appellant and Snap Inc. the appellee. This was the second Federal Circuit appeal in the IPR; in the first, No. 2024-1120, Snap was the appellant.

The patent

U.S. Patent 10,616,727, System and Method for Location-Based Content Delivery and Visualization, issued April 7, 2020, and the Federal Circuit's 2025 opinion describes it as owned by You Map. As the opinion explains, the patent addresses the problem that displaying every social media post on a digital map would overcrowd the display, and it describes a system that provides "an overview of the most important human activity in a country, region, city, or other level" on a map. The original claims recite a system that receives a request including "screen attribute information" about a client device's display and identifies a set of temporally recent social media posts based on that information, along with a "combined ranking" step built from two customized scores. In one embodiment described in the patent, the client's request includes a "current zoom level," and users who zoom out may see posts with higher importance values.

The IPR and the substitute claims

According to the 2025 opinion, Snap petitioned for inter partes review of all claims of the '727 patent on obviousness grounds, and the Board instituted review and determined that claims 1-20 were unpatentable as obvious, a determination not challenged in that appeal. During the IPR, You Map filed a contingent motion to amend proposing substitute claims 21-40, which replaced "screen attribute information" with "current zoom level," and it requested preliminary guidance. You Map withdrew substitute claims 24, 26, 34 and 36 before the final written decision.

In its final written decision, the Board determined that substitute claims 21-23, 25, 27-33, 35 and 37-40 were not obvious because of the added "current zoom level" limitation. The Board found that the primary prior art reference, U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2015/0334077 (the '077 publication), disclosed sending a request containing a "radius" but not a "current zoom level," and that a skilled artisan would not have been motivated to include a current zoom level in that reference's request. The Board also found that the '727 patent provides adequate written description support for the "combined ranking" step.

The first appeal: affirmed in part, vacated in part

Snap appealed. On October 1, 2025, a panel of Circuit Judges Dyk, Hughes and Stark, in a nonprecedential opinion by Judge Dyk in Snap Inc. v. You Map, Inc., No. 2024-1120, affirmed in part, vacated in part, and remanded. The court held that substantial evidence supports the Board's finding that the '077 publication does not disclose a request that includes a "current zoom level," because the reference's zoom level and its radius achieve the same result of setting a search perimeter through two different mechanisms.

The court reached a different result on motivation to modify. It noted that You Map did not file a reply to Snap's opposition to the motion to amend, although the Board's motion to amend pilot program allowed one, and so offered no evidence to rebut the testimony of Snap's expert that including the zoom level would have been an obvious and predictable design choice. The court held that the Board's rejection of Snap's theory of replacing the radius with a zoom level was not supported by substantial evidence, and that the Board's analysis rested on "a flawed understanding of KSR," citing KSR International Co. v. Teleflex, Inc. It vacated the Board's finding of no motivation to modify, stating that "[u]nder the correct legal standard, the undisputed evidence established a motivation to modify the radius" in the reference's search request "to instead be based on the zoom level parameter disclosed in the prior art," and that on remand "the Board's consideration of obviousness must be consistent with this conclusion."

The court affirmed the Board's written description ruling, holding that the Board acted within its discretion in accepting You Map's citations to the specification and that substantial evidence supports its finding that the patent discloses the "combined ranking" step. Costs were awarded to Snap.

What to watch next

The dismissal closes the second appeal, and the order issued as the mandate the same day. Watch for the USPTO to issue the inter partes review certificate for the '727 patent under 35 U.S.C. 318(b), which cancels any claim finally determined to be unpatentable, confirms any claim determined to be patentable, and incorporates any new or amended claim determined to be patentable.