Judge Chooses Simplest Claim Construction in a Markman Hearing Shootout

The judge on the Juxtacomm versus Ascential Et Al case released a preliminary list of patent construction terms and definitions and it looks like the definitions from the plaintiff were preferred to the more specific definitions from the defendant.

Quick History: JuxtaComm dreams of $138 billion in lawsuit against ETL vendors and sue the biggest software vendors in the world for patent infringement. Last week The Small Fish Settle in Juxtacomm versus Ascential Et Al where five of the parties agreed to a preliminary settlement leaving seven parties fighting it out including the big fish of IT in IBM, Microsoft and Business Objects.

The Markman Hearing game here was quite simple – you take a bunch of key phrases out of the data integration patent owned by Juxtacomm and Teilhard technologies, terms like “metadata database” and “script” and you try to agree on a definition for these terms so you can work out which parts of the defendants software suite infringe on the patent. When you can’t agree on definitions you bring in the judge and he reads both sets of opinions and comes up with a set of terms. Generally the Plaintiff provides simple and general definition so they can argue that a wide range of products infringe while the defence tries to pin the terms back with more specific definitions. This week the judge filed his preliminary ruling on these terms:

Case 2:07-cv-00359-LED Document 458 Filed 02/10/2009

This is a preliminary order concerning the claim construction of U.S. Patent No. 6,195,662 (“the ‘662 patent”). The Court’s determination of disputed terms in the ‘662 patent are listed in the chart below. A full claim construction opinion will be forthcoming.

What follows is a list of terms and definitions from that filing which mean almost nothing to you I or a lamp post, and matched them up to the terms and definitions that were submitted by both parties last year in the filing “JOINT CLAIM CONSTRUCTION AND PREHEARING STATEMENT IDENTIFICATION OF DISPUTED CLAIM TERMS WITH INTRINSIC AND EXTRINSIC EVIDENCE”. I’ve then scored each definition based on whose definition “won” and got their definition for the upcoming court case in November to see who did best in the Markman Hearing Shootout.

The Plaintiff is Juxtacomm (owned by Teilhard Technologies), the defendants are IBM, Microsoft, Informatica, Metastorm, Sybase, Intersystems and Software AG, the judge is Leonard Davis – United States District Judge.