Claim Construction Order and Order Granting Summary Judgment, Segan LLC v. Zynga Inc., 14-cv-01315 (Judge Vince Chhabria)
It is ordinary in patent cases for the patentee to ascribe "plain and ordinary" meaning to claim terms while the defendant seeks narrow, limiting language based on intrinsic evidence (e.g., statements in the patent specification) and/or extrinsic evidence (e.g., dictionary definitions). However, Judge Chhabria's recent Order demonstrates that accused infringers have the opportunity to effectively turn the tables in certain situations. That is precisely what Zynga did in its litigation with Segan LLC, where the claims' ordinary language was enough to convince Judge Chhabria that the accused products plainly do not infringe.
Zynga is well-known for its mobile and Facebook-hosted video games such as Farmville and Mafia Wars. After Segan accused these and other Zynga games of infringement, the parties identified "ten claim terms ... they believed were the most significant for resolution of the case," two of which Judge Chhabria construed for being case-dispositive.
The first claim term was "without requiring user interaction with the service provider." Segan argued that the term meant "without the user having to take an action to leave the target website and visit a service provider site to take some action at that site." Zynga instead opted to argue that the term does not require a special construction, and Judge Chhabria agreed. In doing so, he acknowledged that the patent describes the invention as addressing the problem of an Internet user clicking on a web page banner advertisement and being directed from the host web page to a web page associated with the banner advertisement sponsor. Nevertheless, he concluded that adopting Segan's construction would unjustifiably narrow the proper scope of the claim term. And under the plain and ordinary construction, Judge Chhabria found that Zynga's games do not infringe because a Facebook game user consistently engages with Zynga (the service provider), which provides all the code and content for the gaming experience.
The second claim term was "offering a new character enhancement," as used in the phrase "a target website for offering a new character enhancement for the user's character icon." Segan proposed the construction "making a character enhancement known and available to a user," while Zynga again argued for the ordinary meaning of "offering." Judge Chhabria once more agreed with Zynga, noting that the patent's specification repeatedly and consistently uses the word in its ordinary sense. He also rejected the theory that the target website need not do the "offering." Rather, Judge Chhabria found that such a construction would contradict both the teaching of the specification and the grammar of the claims. He ultimately concluded that Zynga's games do not meet this claim limitation because Facebook, which is the "target website," does not do the "offering"—Zynga does.
Judge Chhabria's Order serves as a reminder that patent defendants should reconsider the ordinary jockeying of positions during claim construction and, where appropriate, seek to leverage the "plain and ordinary" meaning of disputed terms.
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