Today a unanimous panel of the Federal Circuit upheld a summary judgment of non-infringement in a case that prompted the district court to describe the behavior of lawyers as less professional than "vipers slithering around on hot coals." The suit accused several dozen companies of infringing a patent regarding "Character Pattern Recognition and Communications Apparatus". The summary judgment hinged on whether the claim term "syllabic element" meant "a one-syllable letter group" or, more broadly, "a word or a part of a word" with no limit on the number of syllables comprising it. The district court accepted the narrower construction. The Federal Circuit agreed. Board of Regents of the University of Texas System v. BENQ Am. Corp., No. 07-1388 (Fed. Cir. July 23, 2008).
