• December 29, 2009

President Clinton was subjected to widespread scorn and derision when an August, 1998 deposition transcript was made public in which he answered (answered?) a question by saying that the answer depended on what the definition of “is” is.

Lawyers, as a group, presumably laughed a little less hard than lay people at Clinton’s careful parsing (if they put their politics aside at least) and, I would submit, patent litigators, should have been the most sympathetic to Clinton’s scrupulous attention to subtle nuances of meaning (I am giving him the benefit of the doubt as to his motivations).

Patent lawyers will spend hundreds of hours arguing and briefing what language like “detecting that a document … is being displayed” means in a patent (see below).  One lesson that U.S. District Court Schiltz would like the patent litigation bar to take to heart:  if you’re going to tell the Court what certain language in a patent means, you’re probably not going to want to contradict yourself two or three times…(Below, an order from the Court saying that Defendant Vendio will have to foot the bill for briefing on the third go-round of what “detecting that a document is being displayed” means.)

(This is not Vendio’s first run-in with the Court on issues of process. Back in 2008, the Court severely criticized Vendio for violating “the spirit, if not the letter” of the Local Rules on word limits. Northbrook Digital, LLC v. Vendio Services, Inc., No. 07-2250, 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 45019 (D. Minn. June 9, 2008))

North Brook Vendio Claim Construction

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