New '127 patent in ITC action against NOK, et al...
revlis is correct, that this new patent, issued in June, addresses the deficiencies in patent 6.973,579 (the '579 patent) that was in the original ITC action against NOK. The '579 patent was dropped in the latter stages of the prior ITC action, although I felt this was clearly one of our strongest patents.
Here is claim 1 from the ‘579 patent:
1. An apparatus comprising: an input configured to accept a user identification comprising L bits; and a
1/2 rate convolutional encoder for processing at least the bits of the user identification by a 1/2 rate
convolutional code to produce a code used for scrambling a high speed shared control channel (HSSCCH).
Here is a brief recap of my comments on the ‘579 patent from September 2009:
Claim 1: As IDCC stated in their petition for review, this was intended to be the broadest claim in the patent. IDCC’s position was that the term “apparatus”, which appears in the preamble to the claim, means “a base station and/or a User Equipment”. NOK’s position was that this term means base station only, as they knew that the only way they would avoid infringement was to convince the ALJ that this claim does not apply in this case. As we know, the ALJ sided with NOK and ruled that this claim applies only to a base station and for that reason NOK’s handsets don’t infringe.
What is amazing to me is the ALJ says in his determination that “respondents do not dispute that all elements of claim 1 are satisfied by [their] handsets under the complainants constructions”, yet the ALJ ruled against IDCC on every one of the claims construction issues (it would have looked less suspicious, IMO, if he had thrown IDCC a bone or two but he didn’t). The construction of the “apparatus” term was the critical determination the ALJ made in his decision. The rationale he used for determining that this term needed construing in the first place was that “apparatus” is a generic term that gives no information about what function the “apparatus” is supposed to perform, so anyone reading the patent would dive into the claims language to get a definition for this term. IDCC had argued that the term was intentionally vague and required no construction – that in fact it is clear that this claim is intentionally broad, was intended to cover both the BS and the UE, and subsequent claims are narrower in scope and specifically apply to either base stations or user equipment.
The basis for the ALJ’s construction of “apparatus” was the phrase “a code used for scrambling” from the claim. The ALJ concluded that this is a functional limitation on the term “apparatus” and implies that an “apparatus” must perform scrambling, as scrambling is only performed in the base station. Therefore the entire claim was limited to base stations in his ID.
Now, here is the new Claim 1 from the ‘127 patent that was just issued…
1. A wideband code division multiple access (WCDMA) user equipment (UE) comprising: circuitry in the WCDMA LTE configured to process a high speed shared control channel (HS-SCCH); and circuitry in the WCDMA UE configured to recover payload data from a high speed physical downlink shared channel (HS-PDSCH) associated with the HS-SCCH in response to the HS-SCCH including bits; wherein the bits are a result of a combining of a user specific scrambling sequence associated with the UE with control information; and wherein the user specific scrambling sequence is a result of a 1/2 rate convolutional encoding of a UE identification (ID).
Note that IDCC now clearly calls out the user equipment (UE) so as to remove any argument this patent applies to the base station only.
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