. Metz had thought the PTAB would rule in her favor because Rogue had failed to provide art that would show someone else had thought of the invention first; she didn't know the PTAB has invalidated 84 percent of the patents it’s reviewed since 2011. And it ruled that Metz’s patents were invalid because her innovation was too obvious.
Metz appealed the ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which affirmed the PTAB’s decision in October 2021. By then, Metz had spent over $500,000 fighting for her patents. On top of that, she'd lost her previous licensing deals because the technology was no longer proprietary. “I realized that they were hard to find because, I will say, 80 percent of them are too depressed, in hiding and not talking about it,” she says. “Because it's humiliating. It's defeating. It's confusing. ... But I can't operate that way. I can't be angry every day, and so we just have to find a way to fix it.”