The Federal Circuit’s New Reluctance to Limit Claims

Dali Wireless Inc. v. CommScope Techs. LLC, No. 20-1045 (Fed. Cir. Sept. 6, 2023).

Federal Circuit’s decision in Dali Wireless parallels the issues that I recently discussed in an analysis of the court’s September 1 decision in Sisvel International v. Sierra Wireless. Both cases grapple with claim construction and the tension between construing claims broadly versus importing limitations from the specification.

In Sisvel, the Federal Circuit affirmed the PTAB’s broad construction of “connection rejection message” over the mobile-network patentee’s arguments that the term should be limited to GSM/UMTS networks. Although the disclosed embodiments all focused on GSM/UMTS networks, the claims were drafted broadly without a clear disclaimer or redefinition.

Similarly, in Dali Wireless, the patentee argued for a narrow construction of the claim term “any” in the claims as sending signals to only a specific remote unit. US9531473. Once again the Federal Circuit upheld the PTAB’s broader construction. Despite embodiments showing selective sending, the court declined to import limitations absent clear intent to limit claim scope.  Under a broad construction, the prior art clearly taught the limitations and therefore rendered the claims unpatentable.

Continue reading The Federal Circuit’s New Reluctance to Limit Claims at Patently-O.