This morning the Federal Circuit issued a precedential opinion in a patent case and a nonprecedential opinion in case dismissed by the Court of Federal Claims for lack of jurisdiction. Here are the introductions to the opinions.
Plastic Omnium Advanced Innovation and Research v. Donghee America, Inc. (Precedential)
Plastic Omnium Advanced Innovation and Research appeals from a grant of summary judgment of noninfringement by the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware. The district court’s determinations on summary judgment are consistent with its claim construction and supported by undisputed facts in the record. We affirm.
CLEVENGER, Circuit Judge, dissenting.
The majority frames the parties’ dispute as one focused on the meaning of the term “extruded parison.” The majority concludes, as the district court did, that such a dispute cannot preclude summary judgment because the patentee acted as his own lexicographer when he defined the term “extruded parison” in one of the asserted patent specifications. According to the majority, the district court correctly construed the term in accordance with the patentee’s definition, and then simply applied that construction to the accused device, which did not include the claimed parison. To both the district court and the majority, the claimed extruded parison cannot exist in Donghee’s process because the plastic is cut inside of a “die,” contravening the district court’s construction. But by blessing the district court’s analysis, the majority commits the same error. Both rely on Donghee’s nomenclature—the fact that its cutting structure is called a “die”—to find no infringement. That analysis elides the key factual dispute: Does Donghee’s accused process have more than one die? The real dispute therefore is not over an extruded parison and what it takes to create one—in fact, the parties agree on that front—but is instead over the term “die” and whether Donghee’s extrusion head contains one. Plastic Omnium presented sufficient evidence to create a material factual dispute over the structure of Donghee’s extrusion head, and I therefore respectfully dissent from the majority’s decision.
Blodgett v. United States (Nonprecedential)
Diane S. Blodgett and Tom Lingenfelter are associates of T.G. Morgan, Inc., a rare coin dealer that was shut down by the Federal Trade Commission in the early 1990s for fraudulent and deceptive business practices. Shortly after the shutdown, TGM’s creditors forced the company into bankruptcy. More than 25 years later, Blodgett and Lingenfelter, proceeding pro se, filed a lawsuit at the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. Their 832-page complaint alleged that the 1990s proceedings were part of an “egregious conspiracy” perpetrated by multiple federal courts, multiple federal agencies, and by their own attorneys. The Claims Court dismissed Blodgett’s and Lingenfelter’s complaint for lack of subject matter jurisdiction, untimeliness, and failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted. [SA 1, 5] Because we agree with the Claims Court on each ground for dismissal, we affirm.