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8 March 2018Patents

Federal Circuit backs car makers in patent clash

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit handed a win to car makers including Fiat, Toyota, Nissan and Ford, after affirming a district court’s summary judgment decisions yesterday.

Previously, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York said a number of car makers had not infringed US patent number 7,152,840, and dismissed the complaint with prejudice in several other cases.

The patent, owned by inventor Chikezie Ottah, is called “Book holder”. It is described as “a removable book holder assembly for use by a person in a protective or mobile structure such as a car seat, wheelchair, walker, or stroller”.

The patent’s specification concludes with the statement that the book holder may be used to hold items other than books, such as audio/video equipment, mobile phones and cameras.

In a second complaint, Ottah claimed “I invented a mobile camera” and that the defendants were using and selling a camera holder which infringed the ‘840 patent.

General Motors, Nissan, Toyota and others moved to dismiss on the grounds that the ‘840 patent is explicit to a book holder so Ottah couldn’t plead a plausible claim for infringement by a camera holder.

Fiat, Ford, Jaguar Land Rover North America and others moved for summary judgment, arguing that their camera holders didn’t meet the “re-movable attachment” limitation in claim 1 of the patent because the camera holders on their vehicles cannot be removed without tools.

The New York court granted the motion to dismiss with prejudice, finding that Ottah’s arguments were “legally implausible”. It also granted summary judgment, after observing that the Federal Circuit had previously ruled on the scope of the patent’s claim, holding that the claim requires that any infringing device must be capable of being “removed without tools”.

On appeal, Ottah claimed that the district court had erred in construing the patent’s claim to exclude “fixed mounts” from its scope, and that the mention of cameras in the patent specification establishes equivalency of a book platform and a camera platform.

The Federal Circuit noted that prosecution history prevents claim 1 from encompassing “fixed mounts” that require tools for removal under the doctrine of equivalents.

“We discern no error in the district court’s grant of summary judgment of non-infringement, for no reasonable fact finder could find that the accused cameras meet the ‘removably attached’ limitation of claim 1,” said Circuit Judge Pauline Newman, on behalf of the court.

The Federal Circuit also affirmed the district court’s dismissal with prejudice.

Newman added: “The district court correctly found that the ‘book holder’ cannot plausibly be construed to include or be the equivalent of a camera holder, in view of the specification and the prosecution history.”

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