Interdigital Communications, Inc and Ors. Vs. ZTE Corporation and Anr.

United States of America

03.11.2017

Intellectual Property Rights

If the testimony provided by an expert is consistent with the infringement action then the infringement is liable to be proven

The background against which the instant Appeals have been filed is that InterDigital Communications, Inc.; InterDigital Technology Corp.; IPR Licensing, Inc.; and InterDigital Holdings (collectively, InterDigital) brought this suit against ZTE Corp. and ZTE (USA) Inc. (collectively, ZTE) in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware. InterDigital alleged that ZTE was infringing U.S. Patent Nos. 7,190,966 and 7,286,847, which, as relevant here, claim a specified apparatus for wireless communications. InterDigital and ZTE have litigated these patents and related ones before the International Trade Commission in at least three proceedings, two of which resulted in written decisions from this court: Inter- Digital Communications, LLC v. International Trade Commission (InterDigital I), 690 F.3d 1318 (Fed. Cir. 2012), and InterDigital Communications, LLC v. International Trade Commission (InterDigital II), 601 F. App’x 972 (Fed. Cir. 2015). In this case, a jury found ZTE liable for infringement of the ’966 and ’847 patents, and the District Court denied ZTE’s post-trial motion for judgment of non infringement as a matter of law. ZTE appeals a key claim construction adopted by the District Court as well as the Court’s denial of its post-trial motion. This Court observed that InterDigital’s invalidity expert did not give testimony inconsistent with that infringement finding. InterDigital’s invalidity expert testified that one cannot randomly select a series of chips to serve as the preamble, then randomly select a series of chips to serve as the message, and ultimately claim that the preamble and message are part of a same code. He agreed with counsel that the two generated codes cannot be retrospectively combined but that the “same code has to be something which is somehow defined to be a sequence.” His testimony is consistent with the Qualcomm documents, on which the infringement expert relied, as well as the 3GPP technical specification. The Qualcomm design documents explain that “the scrambling code for the [P]RACH message corresponds to the same scrambling code that is used in the construction of the [P]RACH preamble.” Hence, we affirm the District Court’s finding.

Tags : Patents Infringement Expert

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