Intellectual Property Law

Federal Circuit: And can mean or, if it makes the claim make sense

By McKee, Voorhees & Sease, P.L.C.

In a decision last week, the Federal Circuit affirmed a district court's permanent injunction against a defendant to prevent infringement of a patent.  The district court held the patent not invalid and infringed, based in part on a claim construction that construed the word "and" to mean "or."  Specifically, based on the specification and other claims, the court determined such a construction was consistent with the intrinsic evidence.  The court also rejected each of the defendant's affirmative defenses.

The Federal Circuit affirmed.  Turning first to claim construction, the court held "and" can be interpreted to mean "or" in claim language when the specification warrants that construction.  In this case, interpreting "and" as requiring both elements would have rendered some dependent claims meaningless, as well as excluded the preferred embodiment from the claims.  The court also affirmed the rejection of the affirmative defenses of inequitable conduct, obviousness, enablement.  Notably, in discussing the obviousness issue, the court stated:  "a flexible TSM test remains the primary guarantor against a non-statutory hindsight analysis such as occurred in this case."  It will be interesting to see whether the non-TSM grounds for an obviousness rejection outlined in the USPTO's examination guidelines will survive scrutiny by the Federal Circuit.

More detail of Ortho-McNeil Pharm., Inc. v. Mylan Labs., Inc. after the jump.

[More]

Full post as published by FileWrapper on April 08, 2008 (boomark / email).