On Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a ruling that patents owned by licensing company Smartflash, LLC are invalid. The finding kills Smartflash’s hope of restarting lawsuits against Apple, Google, and Samsung. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a set of rulings by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board which said that key claims in seven Smartflash patents relating to data storage technology were invalid because they described an abstract idea, not a patentable invention.