If you read this recent Markman order from a U.S. District Court in California, it starts out by quoting the Phillips case. This is the exact case DM brought up to Judge Krieger in their closing arguments. Nice find sman.

Here are some important paragraphs from the j2 Markman order:

“It is a bedrock principle of patent law that the claims of a patent define the invention to which the patentee is entitled the right to exclude.” (emphasis added) Phillips v. AWH Corp., 415 F.3d 1303, 1312 (Fed. Cir. 2005) (en banc) (internal quotation marks omitted). The construction of a particular patent claim term presents a question of law, to be decided by the Court. Markman, 517 U.S. at 391. The starting point for claim construction is a disputed term’s ordinary meaning. Phillips, 415 F.3d at 1313.

The claims, of course, do not stand alone; a person of ordinary skill in the art “is deemed to read [a] claim term not only in the context of the particular claim in which the disputed term appears, but in the context of the entire patent, including the specification.” Phillips, 415 F.3d at 1313-14 (emphasis added). Accordingly, the specification is “the primary basis for construing the claims” in light of the “statutory requirement that the specification describe the claimed invention in full, clear, concise, and exact terms.” Id. at 1315 (internal quotation marks omitted) (emphasis added).

The court’s ultimate goal is to construe the disputed terms in a manner consistent with the way the inventor defined them and a person of ordinary skill in the art would understand them. “The construction that stays true to the claim language and most naturally aligns with the patent’s description of the invention will be, in the end, the correct construction.” Phillips, 415 F.3d at 1316 (internal quotation marks ommitted).