MPHJ Tech v. Ricoh (Fed. Cir. 2017)[16-1243-opinion-2-9-2017-11]
MPHJ’s patent enforcement campaign helped revive calls for further reform of the patent litigation system. The patentee apparently mailed out thousands of demand letters to both small and large businesses who it suspected of infringing its scan-to-email patents. The primary patent at issue is U.S. Patent No. 8,488,173.
Ricoh, Xerox, and Lexmark successfully petitioned for inter partes review (IPR), and the PTAB concluded that the challenged claims (1–8) are invalid as both anticipated and obvious.[1] On appeal, the Federal Circuit has affirmed.
Claim 1 is a fairly long sentence – 410 words, but basically requires a scanner with the ability to both store a local file and also email a file that can be operated with a “go button” followed by “seamless” transmission. The patent itself is based upon a complex family of 15+ prior US filings, most of which have been abandoned, with the earliest priority filing of October 1996.
Although more than 20 years ago, there was prior art even back then. However, the identified prior art process was apparently not entirely “seamless” in operation. On appeal, the patentee asked for a narrowing construction of the claim scope to require “a one-step operation without human intervention.” Unfortunately for MPHJ, the claims are not so clear.
Relying upon the Provisional to Interpret the Claims: Attempting to narrow the claim scope, MPHJ pointed to one of the referenced provisional applications that disclosed a “one step” process requiring the user to simply push “a single button” On appeal, the Federal Circuit agreed that the provisional is relevant, but not how MPHJ hoped. Rather, the court found that the fact MPHJ omitted those limiting statements when it drafted the non-provisional serves as a suggestion that the claims were not intended to be limited either.
We agree that a provisional application can contribute to understanding the claims.[2] . . . In this case, it is the deletion from the ’798 Provisional application that contributes understanding of the intended scope of the final application. . . . We conclude that a person of skill in this field would deem the removal of these limiting clauses to be significant. The [challenged] Patent in its final form contains no statement or suggestion of an intent to limit the claims to the deleted one-step operation. Neither the specification nor the claims state that this limited scope is the only intended scope. Instead, the ’173 Patent describes the single step operation as “optional.” . . . A person skilled in this field would reasonably conclude that the inventor intended that single-step operation would be optional, not obligatory.
MPHJ’s efforts really should be written up as a case-study. Unfortunate for patentees that this is the case members of the public will continue to hear about for years to come.
For patent prosecutors. Here we have another example of how a low-quality provisional filing failed the patentee. Now, you have to recognize that changes you make when filing the non-provisional will be used against you in the claim construction process. While there may be ways to use this strategically, I expect that more patentees will be trapped than benefited.
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[1] Ricoh Ams. Corp. v. MPHJ Tech. Invs., No. IPR2014-00538, 2015 WL 4911675, (P.T.A.B. Aug. 12, 2015).
[2] See Trs. of Columbia Univ. in New York v. Symantec Corp., 811 F.3d 1359, 1365 (Fed. Cir. 2016) (looking to the provisional application for guidance as to claim construction); Vederi, LLC v. Google, Inc., 744 F.3d 1376, 1383 (Fed. Cir. 2014) (same).