SARAH EVANS BARKER, District Judge.
Before the Court are questions of claim construction arising from the pending patent litigation. After the parties filed a "Joint Claim Construction Statement" [Docket No. 31] on March 5, 2014, they submitted briefs addressing the disputed issues. Pursuant to the United States Supreme Court's holding in Markman v. Westview Instruments, Inc., 517 U.S. 370 (1996), we held a claim construction hearing on July 8, 2014. Having considered the written and oral arguments of the parties, we construe the disputed claim terms in the manner detailed below.
The parties have not yet conducted discovery or submitted motions addressing the merits of the suit; we accordingly present only a brief summary of the facts to elucidate our other rulings. Plaintiff CarCheckup, LLC designs and manufactures electronic devices to aid automobile owners and drivers. Compl. ¶ 1. The device at issue is a small, handheld unit that plugs into an electronic port in a car and relays diagnostic data via the interne to a computer server database, which then produces a report for the car owner. Docket No. 33 at 1-4. Plaintiff alleges that Defendants CarMD.com ("CarMD") and Innova Electronics Corporation ("Innova") have infringed on two patents Plaintiff holds in the device: Patent No. 6,807,469 ("the '469 Patent") and Patent No. 6,925,368 ("the '368 Patent").
The two defendant corporations share a CEO and a principal place of business, and they have the same legal representation. CarMD is a California corporation. Compl. ¶ 2. Plaintiff alleges that CarMD sells two products infringing its patents: the "CarMD Handheld Device and Software Solution Kit," which it began selling in 2006, and the "Vehicle Health System" (a larger package including the handheld device and other accessories), which it started selling in 2010. Id. at 20-39. Innova is a Nevada corporation doing business in California; it sells the 3030e CanOBD2 Car Reader and 3030f CanOBD2 Diagnostic Tool, both of which are "code readers" designed to enable electronic diagnosis of problems with a user's car. Id. at ¶¶ 40-52. Plaintiff asserts, and Innova denies, that Innova also sells CarMD's allegedly infringing products in addition to its own. Id. at ¶ 55.
Both the '469 Patent and the '368 Patent consist of 24 claims. Plaintiff alleges that CarMD and Innova have infringed claims 1, 7, 17, 18, 19, and 21 of both patents by selling the CarMD products, and that Innova has infringed claims 1, 17, 18, 19, and 21 of both patents by selling the Innova products. See Compl. ¶¶ 54-56, 63-65. Plaintiff seeks a judgment of infringement, injunctive relief, and damages pursuant to 35 U.S.C. § 284.
Although both patents consist of a total of 24 claims, the language in dispute here is principally contained within two independent claims: Claim 1 and Claim 17. Both claims are reproduced below, with the disputed terms emphasized.
Before addressing the merits of a patent infringement suit, the district court is required to decide any outstanding issues of claim construction as a matter of law. See Markman v. Westview Instruments, Inc., 517 U.S. 370, 384-386 (1996); Vederi, LLC v. Google, Inc., 744 F.3d 1376, 1382 (Fed. Cir. 2014). As the scope of a claim "is necessarily determined by the language of the claim, claim construction must begin with these words." Dow Agrosciences LLC v. Crompton Corp., 381 F.Supp.2d 826, 831 (S.D. Ind. 2005). Absent an express intent otherwise, claim terms are to be given "the ordinary and customary meaning . . . that the term would have to a person of ordinary skill in the art in question at the time of the invention, i.e., as of the effective filing date of the patent application." Phillips v. AWH Corp., 415 F.3d 1303, 1313 (Fed. Cir. 2005).
The most important tools at the court's disposal in determining the ordinary and customary meaning of disputed terms constitute the intrinsic evidence—the claims themselves, the specification, and the prosecution history. Dow Agrosciences, 381 F. Supp. 2d at 831. Extrinsic evidence, such as dictionaries and treatises, may also be used to construe the claims meaning, but such evidence is afforded less legal significance than that from intrinsic sources. See C.R. Bard, Inc. v. U.S. Surgical Corp., 388 F.3d 858, 862 (Fed. Cir. 2004). In short, as the Federal Circuit emphasized in Phillips:
415 F.3d at 1316 (quoting Renishaw PLC v. Marposs SocietdTer Azioni, 158 F.3d 1243, 1250 (Fed. Cir. 1998)).
In their "Joint Claim Construction Statement," the parties identified six sets of claim terms the meaning of which remain in dispute. We will address each in turn, but we note at the outset that two central definitional issues cut across these six disputed terms.
We are aware as we construe the six disputed terms that these key questions underlie and inform the parties' arguments and, we surmise, shape their longer term strategic goals in this litigation.
Both parties agree that "unprocessed diagnostic data" and "unprocessed data" are used interchangeably in the patents and should be construed identically.
Plaintiff contends that the term "diagnostic data"/"data" should be construed to refer only to "data about problems or malfunctions in a vehicle"—more specifically, to error codes.
Defendants counter that "diagnostic data" denotes any data retrieved from the vehicle's diagnostic port—in other words, the data itself need not be "diagnostic" in nature. Docket No. 34 at 10. In support, they point to Claim 10, which speaks only of the retrieval of "data" from the vehicle, and Claim 14, which states that "data retrieved from the onboard computer includes diagnostic data." Docket No. 34 (citing '368 Patent at 17:56-58, 18:27-28).
Plaintiff defines "unprocessed" data as that which "requires processing to be understood by a typical consumer." See Docket No. 33 at 10. Defendants define it as "raw data that has not been converted into any other form, or format, or otherwise organized, stored, sorted, validated, aggregated or analyzed"; they have simplified this further as comprising data "in the form and format retrieved from the vehicle." Docket No. 34 at 10. Because Defendants' proposed definition of "unprocessed" better accords with the plain meaning of the term, we adopt it.
Our task in claim construction is generally to give a term its "ordinary and customary meaning"—the meaning that the term would have to a "person of ordinary skill in the art in question at the time of the invention." Phillips v. AWH Corp., 415 F.3d 1303, 1312 (Fed. Cir. 2005) (citing Innova/Pure Water, Inc. v. Safari Water Filtration Sys., Inc., 381 F.3d 1111, 1116 (Fed. Cir. 2004)). The person of ordinary skill in the art, in turn, is "deemed to read the claim term not only in the context of the particular claim in which the disputed term appears, but in the context of the entire patent, including the specification." Id.; Multiform Desiccants, Inc. v. Medzam, Ltd., 133 F.3d 1473, 1477 (Fed. Cir. 1998).
Here, neither the claims themselves nor the specification give clear guidance as to the meaning of the term "unprocessed" as used by the patentee. This is hardly surprising; as a negative term, "unprocessed" can only be understood in conjunction with what it means to "process." Read as a whole, the claims and specification use the term to describe data which has been removed from the automobile, but which has been the subject of no further action—that action being "processing," the meaning of which we will need to define shortly. For instance, Claim 1 describes the method in which the device retrieves, stores, and transfers the unprocessed data; although the handheld unit itself "lacks sufficient data processing capability to fully process the unprocessed diagnostic data into human-useable diagnostic information," the server to which it transfers the unprocessed data via the internet will subsequently process the unprocessed data "into natural language diagnostic information." `469 Patent, 16:48-17:7.
Plaintiff seeks to graft an additional meaning onto this wholly negative definition: it construes data in its "unprocessed" form as being necessarily incomprehensible to the typical consumer. To be sure, the specification mentions in several places that the "non-mechanical layperson," `469 Patent, 3:3-5, the car "user," id. at 14:27-61, or the "consumer" who would otherwise be "left to the mercy of the automobile technician," id. at 2:55-56, are the targets of the patented invention. Another portion of the specification, which Plaintiff relied upon both in its brief and at the hearing, explains that the end goal of the device is to convert unprocessed data into something the typical consumer will find useful. In order to understand the thrust of this passage, a specification excerpt of greater length is helpful.
`469 Patent, 14:6-18 (internal cross-references omitted; emphasis added). As we shall discuss further below, this passage shows that the result of the device's processing is "preferably" comprehensible to the consumer and implies that the original unprocessed data is not "written in a natural language"; it does not, however say anything about the format or comprehensibility of the unprocessed data itself.
We therefore adopt the following construction of the first set of disputed terms—one which draws from the more persuasive aspects of both parties' proposals: we construe "unprocessed diagnostic data" as meaning
In order to construe this language, we must determine the meaning of the terms "processing" and "natural language diagnostic information."
Noting that the specification, in various places, uses the words "convert," "correlate," or "interpret" to describe the device's processing function, Plaintiff argues that "[t]he data processing component portion of the claim essentially refers to the interpretation (or conversion or correlation) of the error codes into natural language information via use of a database." Docket No. 33 at 11. We are not convinced by Plaintiff's choice of words or by its contention that "processing" can only refer to the rendering of data into "a natural language format which may be understood by a typical consumer." The patent, read as a whole, does not support such a limited reading—nor does it define the term "process" in isolation.
It is axiomatic in claim construction that claim language should generally be read to avoid redundancy. Bicon, Inc. v. Straumann Co., 441 F.3d 945, 951 (Fed. Cir. 2006); see also Orlando Food Corp. v. United States, 423 F.3d 1318, 1324 (Fed. Cir. 2005) (in a statutory construction case, noting the rebuttable presumption that terms "should be construed to avoid redundant language"). Claim 1 of the patent describes an external server "containing a processor and database for processing the unprocessed diagnostic data into natural language diagnostic information." `469 Patent at 17:1-4. If, as Plaintiff appears to argue, "processing" refers only to the rendering of data into natural language diagnostic information, then a significant portion of the claim is superfluously worded. Plaintiff's argument is further weakened by the patentee's use of "processing" with a different predicate elsewhere in the claims themselves; both Claim 1 and Claim 17 explain that the device lacks the ability to "fully process the unprocessed diagnostic data into human-usable diagnostic information." Id. at 17: 5-7; 19:4-7.
What, then, does the term "processing" mean by itself? The specification is not particularly helpful in this regard. Plaintiff proposes three candidate synonyms, each of which appears in the specification in conjunction with the device's processing function:
We believe that Plaintiff has misinterpreted the specification here. In light of the multiplicity of verbs appearing in the text in conjunction with "processing," it seems more likely that the patentee was describing different examples or aspects of processing than that it was setting forth its own "lexicography" of the term.
The parties do not substantively disagree about the meaning of the term "natural language diagnostic information." Plaintiff construes the term as "a natural language format which may be understood by a typical consumer." See Docket No. 33 at 13 (citing '469 Patent at 4:15-22, 4:37-44, 4:48-56, 14:14-41). This is something of a tautology, if an understandable one— "natural language" in this context has an apparent, commonsense meaning. Plaintiff illustrates the point by citing to a portion of the specification that provides an example of the patented device's output.
Id. at 14:33-41. The last two segments of this "report" are rendered in natural language—that is, non-technical, non-alphanumeric English; this contrasts pointedly with the first two segments, which consist of an error code and accompanying technical jargon. In their brief, Defendants acknowledge this core distinction: "an alphanumeric code is not `natural language' while a phrase containing words describing a problem is." Docket No. 34 at 13. Their proposed construction, describing natural language only as a "report format," is too vague, but at the hearing they did not dispute the accuracy of Plaintiff's definition of the term.
Another dispute that occupies considerable space in the parties' briefs but seemed to exercise them little at the Markman hearing is Defendants' reference to a "service technician" as a possible target audience of the "natural language" report. Plaintiff's brief vehemently objects to importing service technicians into any construction, contending that the specification and prosecution history make clear the product is directed at consumers who lack the specialist knowledge possessed by a service technician. See Docket No. 33 at 11 (citing '469 Patent at 2:20-3:21, 5:22-46, 3:16-21). As Defendants note, however, the specification also discusses the possibility that a car owner could make use of a natural language report in conjunction with a service technician. We conclude that the dispute is pointless. As Plaintiff conceded at the hearing, "natural language" information that can be understood by a consumer can, a fortiori, be understood by a car professional. Since we have adopted the more rigorous definition of "natural language" that Plaintiff sought, any anxiety on Plaintiff's part that Defendants' mention of service technicians is a Trojan horse for weakening the definition to encompass technical jargon is unwarranted.
We therefore construe the claim term "processing the unprocessed diagnostic data into natural language diagnostic information" to have the following meaning: "
The parties' dispute centers on the meaning of "human-useable diagnostic information." Plaintiff treats "human-useable" as identical to "natural language"; indeed, it defines the two terms in precisely the same tautological manner. Docket No. 33 at 17. Defendants insist that the terms have distinguishable meanings, and they define "human-useable" as any "visual display of diagnostic data, or diagnostic information derived therefrom." Docket No. 34 at 17. The parties also dispute Plaintiffs construction of the term "data processing capability" as encompassing "processing, memory, and database capabilities."
"[W]hen construing terms in the body of a claim, the general assumption is that different terms have different meanings." Symantec Corp. v. Computer Assocs. Int'l, 522 F.3d 1279, 1289 (Fed. Cir. 2008). Unless Plaintiff can point to evidence in the record indicating otherwise, the presumption against interpreting the two terms as synonyms will stand. See Am. Piledriving Equip., Inc. v. Geoquip, Inc., 637 F.3d 1324, 1335-1336 (Fed. Cir. 2011). Here, the claims and specification confirm that the terms should be construed as distinct. As Defendants point out, the context of the terms' usage in the claims points in this direction: the claims employ "human-useable" in the negative, by way of explaining what capabilities the device lacks; in contrast, the patent uses "natural language" to describe the invention's end-product user report. See '469 Patent at 18:4-15 (Claim 10), 19:3-26 (Claim 17), 20:34-42 (Claim 23). Moreover, the specification strongly suggests that information regarding error codes can be "useable" even in the absence of a more extended "natural language" description. See id. at 6:66-7:2; 14:6-26.
In reply, Plaintiff pointed out at the hearing the specification's statement that, once the data is transferred to the server, "there error codes are processed . . . to provide a human readable report in a natural language"—implying, Plaintiff says, that the two terms have linked meanings. Id. at 14:27-31, 16:27-31. This is less than persuasive. Plaintiff's quoted passage does not compel, or even bolster, the conclusion that all "human readable" reports are necessarily in a natural language format. In fact, the argument Plaintiff presented at the hearing suffers a distinct circularity—it seeks to prove that the two terms' close proximity in the claims signals their equivalence by pointing to occasions in the specification in which they are likewise arrayed in close proximity to one another. In neither the claims nor the specifications, however, did the patentee define the terms as synonymous; absent such evidence, a common-sense understanding should prevail.
If the term is not to be read as equivalent to "natural language," it remains to construe "human-useable" in its own right. The patent language itself is not particularly illuminating in this regard, but the prosecution history may provide some guidance. The patentee emphasized the invention's distinctions from the prior art, in which the (more expensive) diagnostic devices had the capability of "displaying or printing out a message in some format[,]" which could take the form of "either an error code (e.g. error number P0171) or some natural language description of the error (e.g. system too lean (bank one))." `469 Patent at 2:8-19. It explained that the patented device, by contrast, need not "contain any of the database or processing elements necessary to convert the error codes acquired from the vehicle into a human-readable format that either displays the nature of the problem or a suggested solution." Defs.' Ex. 19 at 12-13 (Amendment and Response, 24 Dec. 2003). According to its plain meaning, "human-useable" sets a considerably lower bar than "natural language."
The parties also disagree over the proper construction of the term "data processing capability." Plaintiff insists that the intrinsic evidence gives the term a definition more particular than that suggested by the words themselves—in other words "data processing capability" is not simply "the ability to process." "It is clear," Plaintiff says, "that the entirety of the
Pl.'s Ex. 3 at 11 (7/24/03 Amendment).
We agree with Defendants that Plaintiff has misapplied the intrinsic evidence here. It may be that an "action report" suggesting the cause of, or solution to, automotive problems will require the use of a database; it does not follow, however, that the processing of data to produce any "human-useable" information is impossible without recourse to such a database. The portion of the July 2003 Amendment cited by Plaintiff actually helps drive home this point: it discusses the "processor" and the "data base" as separate entities. See Pl.'s Ex. 3 at 11.
Just as with the construction of "processing," we do not find that the patentee used the claims or specification to craft a special lexicon for the term "data processing capability." Since we have already adopted a definition of "processing," we conclude that the term needs no further elaboration.
We therefore construe the claim term "lacks sufficient data processing capability to fully process the unprocessed diagnostic data into human-useable diagnostic information" to have the following meaning:
The crux of the dispute between the parties with respect to this term is whether the "data capture and memory unit" should be read as capable of transferring unprocessed data to a server via the internet.
The parties agree that the "data capture and memory unit" described in the patent is capable of retrieving ("acquiring") data from an automobile and storing that data electronically. Docket No. 33 at 19; Docket No. 34 at 23. In Claim 17, the patent explicitly describes the functions of the "data capture and memory unit," which itself is a part of the handheld unit—the "data acquisition and transfer device" (DAT). According to the patent, the DAT includes a "data capture and memory unit capable of retrieving unprocessed data from the vehicle via the first data link, storing the unprocessed diagnostic data for a limited time period, and transferring the unprocessed data to the global computer network, through the second data link . . . ." `469 Patent at 18:65-19:3. Two other claims, 10 and 23, ascribe the same three functions to the "data capture and memory unit," but do so in more restrictive language; Claim 10 states that the unit is capable only of performing those three functions, id. at 17:63-18:3, while Claim 23 says that the unit is capable generally only of doing so. Id. at 20:21-29.
We agree with Plaintiff that Claim 17 itself outlines the capabilities of the "data capture and memory unit," and no further exercise in construction is necessary. Pursuant to the presumption that a patentee chooses its words carefully, we do not believe that Claim 17 should be read as strictly limiting the unit to the functionalities described. Cf. Absolute Software, Inc. v. Stealth Signal, Inc., 659 F.3d 1121,1141 (Fed. Cir. 2011) (noting that a court should not construe terms so as to render qualifying words meaningless). The language of Claims 10 and 23 shows clearly that the patentee was capable of inserting explicitly restrictive language when it wanted to, and nothing in the intrinsic record contradicts this reading. In objecting to Plaintiff's proposed construction, Defendants primarily rely on the prosecution history, particularly a statement that accompanied an amendment to Claim 17. In a communication to the Patent Office, the patentee explained: "Claims 10 and 17 have been amended to recite, inter alia, that the handholdable device is a data capture device, with limited functionalities, that relies on a remotely located server for processing information, and a personal computer (or other internet communication capable device) for presenting the processed information to the consumer." Defs.' Ex. 19 (emphasis added). Although this statement might support the notion—undisputed between the parties—that the patented device has "limited functionalities," it is not nearly specific enough to constitute a disclaimer of a data transferring function for the data capture and memory unit.
Defendants also argue that the patentee's substitution of "data capture" for "processor" (the unit had originally been called a "processor and memory unit") indicates that the claim language in Claim 17 should be read to exclude any "processing" capability. But the language of Claim 17 itself settles this issue, as we have already discussed. The claim states that the "hand holdable data acquisition and transfer device"—of which the data capture and memory unit is a part—"lacks sufficient data processing capability to fully process the unprocessed diagnostic data into human-useable diagnostic information." `469 Patent at 19:4-7. There is no need to belabor the question further in construing this particular claim term.
For the reasons we have discussed, we construe the term "data capture and memory unit" simply as follows: a
Plaintiff contends that the dispute over the claim term's construction stems from a typographical error by the U.S. Patent Office. The wording of Claim 17 of the '368 Patent, as submitted to the USPO, described a "data capture and memory unit capable of retrieving unprocessed data via the first data link, storing the unprocessed data
However, Defendants in their brief have accepted Plaintiff's ascription of the issue to a clerical error, and they have agreed to Plaintiff's proposed construction. Docket No. 34 at 26. They add only that "unprocessed data," as used in the claim, should be defined as they have elsewhere proposed. The parties did not dispute this construction at the Markman hearing. We therefore adopt Plaintiff's proposed construction.
The parties agree that "server" requires no further construction, and they also agree that the meaning of "to process the unprocessed data" is determined entirely by the constructions the Court adopts for the first two disputed terms (Sections I and II above). See Docket No. 33 at 28; Docket No. 34 at 26. Relying on the constructions we have adopted above, we therefore construe this term as follows:
For the reasons detailed above, we conclude that the proper construction of the disputed terms of the A69 and '368 Patents is as follows:
IT IS SO ORDERED.
`469 Patent at 6:23-33. We see the use of "additionally" here as revealing. We read this passage as supporting the notion that both "correlating" and "interpreting" are potential aspects or results of the processing of data, but that neither define the term itself
Docket No. 33 at 12. Defendants' brief concedes the point. Docket No. 34 at 16. Thus, we will not include what Plaintiff believes to be Defendants' overly restrictive language in our construction of the claim terms.
