“In a recent post on key patent trials that will involve Apple in June, I said that claim construction in a very important federal lawsuit against Motorola in the Northern District of Illinois (Motorola’s home court) worked out very well for Apple. In particular, Apple’s proposed constructions succeeded with respect to two high-impact patents, the realtime API patent and the touchscreen heuristics patent,” Florian Mueller reports for FOSS Patents. “Two new orders by Judge Posner (dated March 12, but entered into the electronic court records only today) provide further indication that claim construction — a key intermediate step in U.S. patent lawsuits — is going very well for Apple in that Chicago litigation.”
“One of the orders urges the parties to write up claim constructions (phrases that explain the meaning of key terms in the languages of the patent claims ‘in ordinary English intelligible to persons having no scientific or technical background.’ The judge says that ‘the court‐appointed experts could explain opaque claims constructions to the jurors, but that would waste a lot of trial time.’ On Monday, the parties will present their proposals to Judge Posner,” Mueller reports. “While the order expresses concern that ‘many of the proposed claims constructions are not in language intelligible to jurors,’ it notes upfront that ‘[s]ome are; and in this respect Apple’s proposed constructions are on average superior to Motorola’s.'”
Mueller reports, “A second order relates to Motorola’s proposal concerning the interpretation of a term from one of its three asserted standard-essential patents… The text of the order… dismisses Motorola’s related claim construction argument as ‘ridiculous,’ a term that judges use sparingly.”
Much more in the full article here.
Related article:
Samsung suffers second and even more important FRAND defeat to Apple in the Netherlands – March 14, 2012