Posts Tagged: "expert testimony"

Federal Circuit: District Court Properly Struck Expert Testimony that Failed to Apply Agreed-Upon Claim Construction

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) today issued a precedential opinion affirming a district court order that struck parts of an infringement expert report and also granted summary judgment of non-infringement to Valve Corporation. The CAFC held that it is proper to strike expert testimony that did not rely on the agreed upon claim construction adopted by the district court. Treehouse Avatar, LLC owns U.S. Patent 8,180,858, which relates to a method of presenting data based on choices made by users with respect to characters in a network site, such as choosing clothing and hairstyles for the characters. The case turned on the meaning of “character-enabled (CE) network sites” (“CE limitation”) in the claims, which the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) had construed in an earlier inter partes review (IPR) proceeding to mean “a network location, other than a user device, operating under control of a site program to present a character, object, or scene to a user interface.”

CAFC Overturns Win for Nintendo Based on District Court’s Incorrect Claim Construction Analysis

On April 1, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) reversed and remanded a summary judgment decision by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in an infringement suit brought by Genuine Enabling Technology (Genuine) against Nintendo Company and Nintendo of America (collectively “Nintendo”) for allegedly infringing certain claims of Genuine’s U.S. Patent No. 6,219,730 (‘730 patent). The CAFC reversed the district court’s summary judgment decision because the district court erred in its construction of “input signal” and should have construed the term to mean “a signal having an audio or higher frequency.”

It Is Not Fair to Leap Frog Expert Disclosure Requirements: An Analysis of HVLPO2 v. Oxygen Frog

Federal Rule of Evidence 702 makes clear that a qualified expert may testify if he or she could help a trier of fact understand evidence and facts at issue. Fairness and reliability are the lineaments of Rule 702 and other rules governing expert discovery. Simply put, each party is given the opportunity to present expert testimony, and to challenge that of the opposing party. As gatekeepers of expert testimony, judges are careful not to give one party an unfair advantage over another regardless of the type of expert presented. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit recently found that the District Court for the Northern District of Florida abused its discretion by allowing unqualified expert testimony concerning the invalidity of a patent. HVLPO2, LLC v. Oxygen Frog, LLC, Case No. 19-1649 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 5, 2020) (Moore, J) involved the infringement of patents related to an oxygen supply management apparatus for glass blowing.