Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued an opinion in Traxcell Techs., LLC v. Sprint Comms. Co. LP, et al., No. 2020-1852, -1854 (Oct. 12, 2021), affirming summary judgment of non-infringement of four Traxcell patents and indefiniteness of some claims of one patent.
Traxcell sued Sprint and Verizon for infringement of four patents (Nos. 8,977,284; 9,510,320; 9,642,024; and 9,549,388) relating to self-optimizing wireless networks and to navigation technology. After claim construction, the district court granted summary judgment of non-infringement on all four patents and summary judgment that claims 1-11 of the ’284 patent were indefinite. Traxcell appealed.
The Federal Circuit affirmed both summary judgment rulings. With respect to noninfringement, the Court repeatedly faulted Traxcell for its “broad and conclusory scattershot assertions.” For example, in addressing Traxcell’s argument that means-plus-function claim 12 of the ’284 patent was infringed, the Court explained that “[u]nder the function-way-result test, ‘[l]iteral infringement of a means-plus-function claim limitation requires that the relevant structure in the accused device perform the identical function recited in the claim and be identical or equivalent to the corresponding structure in the specification.” Here, the Court determined “the identified structure from the specification is a ‘very detailed’ algorithm,” and “Traxcell neglected to address a significant fraction of that structure” in its infringement analysis. Thus, Traxcell’s infringement argument failed for a lack of specificity.
The Court’s non-infringement determinations for the remaining claims of the four patents similarly referenced the insufficiency of Traxcell’s infringement assertions. The Court repeatedly noted that Traxcell relied on “conclusory statements” and an “unexplained listing of accused elements” that was “insufficient to create a genuine issue of material fact.” The Court faulted Traxcell for submitting “an army of citation footnotes [concerning infringement] crouching in a field of jargon” but failing “to provide the critical link from evidence to infringement.”
The Court’s indefiniteness analysis focused on whether the specification of the ’284 patent disclosed “adequate corresponding structure to perform the claimed function” of means-plus-function claim 1, as corrected by a Certificate of Correction. Here, the Court found that the specification of the ’284 Patent failed to disclose the necessary structure. Moreover, it again faulted Traxcell for relying on arguments that were “vague and speculative” in its failed attempt to identify structure in the specification.