While the patentee’s infringement theory here was tenuous at best, the main takeaway is clear and commonsensical. The term “user” generally refers to a person or party, not an electronic device. If at all possible (and it may not have been for the underlying subject matter here), your claims should cover operations of the device and only inferentially recite the operations of the user. It’s much easier to assert a patent against a manufacturer than a collection of consumers.
Background / Facts: Technology Patents LLC (“TPL”) quite ambitiously sued more than 100 domestic and foreign defendants for infringement of its patent directed to a “global paging system utilizing a land-based packet-switched digital data network (e.g. the Internet) and a feature for permitting subscribers to remotely designate countries in which they are, or expect to be, located.” The claims recite a system for paging of a “receiving user“ (RU) in countries where the RU “may be located,” as per a list input by the RU.
Issue(s): Whether the “receiving user” can be read on a combination of a person and his or her handset rather than merely the person himself or herself.
Holding(s): No. The text of the patent makes clear that the term “receiving user” does not refer to a person-pager combination. For example, the written description repeatedly describes the “receiving user” as either male or female, clearly contemplating that the receiving user is a person. The claims themselves even differentiate between the receiving user and the pager by referring to the receiving user as possessing a pager. Furthermore, one of the primary purposes of the invention was to allow users to be paged only in countries that they selected, rather than in countries automatically selected by the devices they use.