DBI v. IDX . . .
OK, now I've read the opinion, which was issued on July 2. It is highly technical, but it appears to be even more strongly in favor of IDX than the district court decisions. I will quote a couple of areas of the ruling.
"The TP-600 is too different from the patented invention to support a verdict of infringement under the doctrine of equivalents; no reasonable jury could find otherwise. . . . While the district court concluded that prosecution history estoppel precludes a finding of infringement under the doctrine of equivalents, in light of our conclusion that no reasonable jury could find the TP-600 satisfies the limitation of 'generation arrays of slice data,' we do not reach that issue." [In other words, the appeals court concedes less to DBII's argument than the District Court did.]
"Even if we were to agree with DBI that its claim construction was plausible, we would still be compelled . . . to adopt Identix's claim construction. Identix's narrow construction is clearly supported, if not compelled, by the intrinsic evidence. . . . [W]ere we to construe claim 16 in the manner suggested by DBI, we are not sure the resulting claim would be enabled [i.e., DBI would probably still lose].
The court also, and I think rightly, said that DBI's patent application did not give notice to others that it covered the areas DBI was now claiming it covered in this patent appeal.
Here is one final excerpt, and you can easily read between the lines to see what the appeals court thought of DBI's legal argument:
"On the subject of drawings, we share Identix's concern over DBI's use of drawings in their brief. Usually drawings are quite helpful, particularly in cases involving complex technology such as this, and are to be encouraged. Figs. 4-6 and 8 of DBI's brief are a hybrid combination of drawings from the patent and additional figures from an unknown source. Because the drawings incorporated figures from the actual patent they have an air of legitimacy. Figure 4 does have an accompanying footnote that admits that it is 'not specifically illustrated in the patent,' but no such disclaimer appears on Figs. 5-6 or 8. Moreover, Fig. 4 fails to indicate from whence it came. Only upon a search of the record did we discover that similar, but noticeably distinct, versions of these figures were included in DBI's expert's declarations in opposition to Identix's motion for summary judgment. Thus, those figures are arguably misleading and not in an inconsequential way." [In other words, DBI was not being honest with the court in describing its machine, and got caught. This is sleazy, and don't think the appeals court doesn't know it. I have to assume DBI was desperate, and knew they had a very bad case and were willing to cheat to win.] |
