Intellectual Property Discussion Forum

Forum · Joined: Mar 31, 2005 Messages: 19 Location: IP.com Offline

The United States District Court for the Northern District of California granted partial summary judgment in favor of ARM Holdings, PLC, ARM Limited, and ARM, Inc. (collectively ARM), finding that ARM's accused product did not infringe Nazomi Communications, Inc.'s (Nazomi's) U.S. Patent No. 6,332,215 (the '215 patent). Nazomi Communications, Inc. v. Arm Holdings, PLC, No. C 02-02521 (N.D. Cal. Sept. 30, 2003). Because the district court did not construe the disputed claim term in sufficient detail for appellate review, this court vacates and remands...

This court notes that Mr. Patel, one of the inventors named on the '215 patent asserts that he "largely agree[s]" with Mr. Steele, who is ARM's Java program manager, as to how the ARM product operates. Mr. Steele, for his part, presents only a very high-level block diagram of the ARM product and asserts that the product does not infringe, primarily because it translates Java instructions into "control signals," not ARM instructions. Because the '215 patent claims the invention in diverse ways, the trial court on remand will have the opportunity to require more than this superficial description of the operation of the accused product. The trial court may find value, for example, in requesting a set of competing infringement charts, not evident in the record before this court, rather than the thousands of lines of unhelpful computer code. Such charts would assist the court in its comparison of every element in the asserted claims with the accused device.

Accordingly, this court vacates and remands to the district court for a detailed analysis of the disputed claim construction, and for factual findings in support of its noninfringement opinion.

Each party shall bear its own costs.