Fed Circuit reverses PTAB decision in parking dispute
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit handed a partial victory to US company Duncan Parking Technologies (DPT) last week, reversing a decision of the US Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB).
In the judgment, issued Thursday, January 31, the Federal Circuit ruled that the PTAB had “clearly erred” in not finding claims of a parking technology patent owned by IPS Group invalid.
In a separate appeal from IPS, the appeals court vacated in part a decision of the US District Court for the Southern District of California finding non-infringement of IPS’s patents.
The dispute arose over ownership of the technology behind a credit card-enabled, single space parking meter. IPS sued DPT, a subsidiary of parking management company Duncan Solutions, in July 2015, alleging that DPT’s Liberty Single-Space Meter infringed its patents (US numbers 8,595,054 and 7,854,310).
In July 2017, the district court granted DPT’s motion for summary judgment finding non-infringement of the ‘310 patent. The court accepted DPT’s argument that the Liberty Meter did not infringe because it did not contain a “plurality of buttons”, as recited in the patent.
The district court further ruled in December that year that the DPT’s device did not infringe any claims of the ‘054 patent.
During the district court proceedings, DPT had responded to the litigation with a petition to the PTAB for inter partes review of certain claims of the ‘310 patent, arguing that it was anticipated by the ‘054 patent.
The PTAB rejected DPT’s bid to have the patent invalidated in August 2017. The decision was overruled by the Federal Circuit last week, on the grounds that the claims of the ‘310 patent were described in the ‘054 patent, filed a year previously. The PTAB had “clearly erred in concluding otherwise”, the Federal Circuit said.
Separately ruling on IPS’s appeal, the Federal Circuit vacated the district court’s judgment of non-infringement of the ‘054 patent. In the ruling, the Federal Circuit found that the district court had erroneously interpreted the phrase “receivable within” as “capable of being contained entirely inside”.
This, according to the ruling, was too narrow, with the Federal Circuit instead opting for the definition of “capable of being contained inside”.
The Federal Circuit remanded the case to the district court for further proceedings consistent with the revised construction of the ‘054 patent.
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