Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued an opinion in K-fee System GmbH v. Nespresso USA, Inc., No. 2022-2042 (Dec. 26, 2023), reversing a district court’s claim construction and its resulting grant of summary judgment of noninfringement.
K-fee sued Nespresso for infringement of three patents, each of which claims coffee-machine portion capsules displaying information that, when read by a device associated with a coffee machine, can prevent capsules from being used with incompatible machines and/or specify certain brewing parameters. Every claim of the asserted patents included the term “barcode”, which the district court construed as part of its claim construction order. The parties generally agreed a barcode is a visual code having bars of variable width, which includes the lines and gaps. Nespresso argued, however, that K-fee had disclaimed coverage in proceedings concerning a related patent before the European Patent Office (EPO). Specifically, Nespresso argued that, because of this disclaimer, the reference to barcode in the claims could not include the type of “bit code” discussed during the EPO proceedings. The district court agreed with Nespresso and, finding that Nespresso’s products used that type of bit code, granted summary judgment of noninfringement.
The Federal Circuit reversed. On claim construction, the Court held that a person of skill in the art would understand the term “barcode” to refer to a purely visual phenomena—bars of varying widths—rather than other criteria, such as a particular coding of data. Interpreting barcode in this light, the Court concluded that K-fee had not distinguished itself from the prior art because the prior art used “bit codes,” but because the bit codes disclosed by the prior art were not bar codes. The Court explained that the fact the bit codes discussed in the EPO proceedings were not bar codes does not mean bit codes can never take the form of a bar code. And if they do, then they will fall within the scope of the asserted patent claims.
Because the district court applied an incorrect claim construction in its infringement analysis, the district court’s grant of summary judgment of noninfringement also had to be reversed. The Court’s analysis had incorrectly focused on how the codes on the accused products were read, rather than on the visual appearance of those codes. The Court remanded for further proceedings noting that a new analysis, applying the correct claim construction, is required.
