Judge Sleet Grants Summary Judgment of Non-Infringement Following Claim Construction

February 9, 2017

Publication| Intellectual Property

In Quest Licensing Corp. v. Bloomberg LP, C.A. No. 14-561-GMS (D. Del. Jan. 19, 2017), a consolidated action, Judge Sleet granted the defendants’ motion for summary judgment of non-infringement in light of the construction of the term “changing information.”

All of the asserted claims required the receipt or provision of “changing information,” construed by the Court to mean “only [price] data that has changed.” The defendants argued that their accused systems receive and provide transaction information such as “stock trades, bids and quotes” that is always accompanied by “non-changing information such as the stock symbol,” and thus could not infringe the patent at issue.

The plaintiff, Quest Licensing Corp. (“Quest”), responded that the attachment of the stock symbol could still qualify as “changing information,” citing differences between the parties’ experts on this point. But Judge Sleet found this contention to be inconsistent with the Court’s claim construction. Moreover, Judge Sleet concluded that Quest’s brief primarily sought to reverse the Court’s construction, and did not deny that the defendants’ accused systems always receive or provide the stock symbol when transmitting data to users. Judge Sleet granted the defendants’ motion.

Key Points:  Because Judge Sleet infrequently grants leave to move for summary judgment, his decision to do so in this case strongly suggested that he believed there would be an absence of genuine disputes of material fact. Thus, defeating a motion for summary judgment in such instances could be difficult, and it may take more than expert disagreement to show disputes of material fact.

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