N OTE : This disposition is nonprecedential. 

# United States **Court of Appeals**  **for the Federal Circuit**

______________________

MATTHEWS INTERNATION AL CORPORATION, Appellant

v.

VANDOR CORPORATION, Appellee

______________________

2017

- 1889

______________________ Appeal from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Patent Trial and Appeal Board in No. IPR2016

- 00112.

______________________

Decided: March 27 , 2018

______________________

R OBERT W ILLIAM M ORRIS , Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott, LLC, White Plains, NY, argued for appellant. Also represented by O JEIKU C HRISTOPHER A ISIKU ; K EVIN P. A LLEN , Pittsburgh, PA.

H AROLD C. M OORE , Maginot, Moore & Beck LLP, Ind ianapolis, IN, argued for appellee. Also represented by D ANIEL J. G REENHALGH , M ICHAEL A. S WIFT

.

______________________MATTHEWS INTERNATIONAL CORP

. v. VANDOR CORPORATION 2

Before D YK , C HEN , and S TOLL , Circuit Judges.

C HEN , Circuit Judge

. Matthews International Corporation (Matthews) a ppeals the final written decision of the P atent Trial and Appeal Board (Board) in IPR2016

- 00112. In that procee ding, the Board determined that Matthews, the petitioner, had failed to demonstrate by a preponderance of the evidence that claims 1

– 14 of U.S. Patent No. 8,104, 151 (the ’ 151 P atent) were unpatentable

. We have jurisdi ction over this appeal under 28 U.S.C. § 1295(a)(4)(A). Although the Board applied an overly broad understan ding of the claim term “casket,” substantial evidence su pports the Board’s finding that Ma tthews failed to show how the prior art teaches that limitation. For that re ason, we affirm.

D ISCUSSION

The ’151 P atent claims are directed to “a casket a rrang e ment” made of pliable material, such as cardboard

, for example

. The side and end panels of the casket can be folded in such a way to allow the casket to be re

configured in a more flattene d, compact arrangement, for ease of shipping and storage

. As proof that such dual configuration containers as recited in claim 1 already existed at the time of the invention, Matthews relied on U.S. Patent No. 5,050,766 (Groh), which discloses a collapsible cardboard ice chest, and U.S. Patent No. 3,346,399 (Watson), which discloses a collapsible car dboard frozen dough package.
However, claim 1 also recites the limitation “wherein the bottom panel, the side panels and the end panels form a casket body.” Rather than argue that it would have been obvious to modify existing cardboard cremation caskets to include the known folding properties disclosed in Groh or Watson, Matthews argued before the Board that the “casket body” limitation was merely “ an intendedMATTHEWS INTERNATION AL CORP

. v. VANDOR CORPORATION 3

use ” and should receive no patentable weight. J.A. 58

. The Board disagreed, concluding that the structural term “casket body” was entitled to patentable weight. J.A. 22

– 23

. The Board noted that the ’151 Patent specification describes “casket body 11” as “form[ing] a container for receiving the remains of the deceased.” ’151 Patent col. 3 ll. 42

– 43. The Board thus construed “casket body” as “an

arrangem ent capable of receiving or containing the r emains of a deceased.” J.A. 27. In its institution decision, the Board limited the term “deceased” to “deceased h umans,” but in its final written decision, the Board credited the Petitioner’s submitted evidence of pet caskets, and thus broadened the term “deceased” to include animals. Despite using that broader construction, the Board found that Matthews never provided any evidence or reasoning for why either Groh or Watson’s container satisfied the casket body limitation.
On appeal, Matthews reiterates its argument that “casket body” is purely an intended use and thus should be accorded no patentable weight. We disagree. “Casket body” is a structural term in the body of the claim that further defines and limits the scope of the claimed inve ntion. That structural terms are sometimes defined

— through claim construction

— by the functions they are designed to perform does not somehow convert those structural terms into “an intended use” stripped of any patentable w eight. Based on the disclosure of the ’151 P atent that the casket body “forms a container for recei ving the remains of the deceased,” we agree with the Board that “an arrangement capable of receiving or containing the remains of a deceased” 1 is the broadest reasonable interpretation of “casket body.”

1 We note that neither party, whether before the Board or this court, raised the issue of how the words “the remains of” should be understood, i.e., whether remainsMATTHEWS INTERNATIONAL CORP

. v. VANDOR CORPORATION 4

However, we do not agree with the Board that the term “deceased” includes animals or other non

- human bodies . The ’151 P atent specification repeatedly uses the noun “deceased” to refer to the contents of the casket. See ’151 Patent col. 1 ll. 43, 47, 55; col. 3 ll. 43, 50, 52, 60; col. 5 ll. 10

– 12; col. 6 l. 25. As Vandor Corporation, the patent owner, correctly pointed out to the Board, “deceased,” in its noun form, universally refers to a human. J.A. 667 &

n. 2; see, e.g. , Deceased

, M ERRIAM -W EBSTER , merriam

webster.com/ dictionary/deceased (defi n ing the noun form of “deceased” as “a dead person”). Nothing in the written description or figures suggests a broader understanding of its usage of “deceased.” Indeed, they all contemplate a casket configured for a dead person. See ’151 Patent col. 5 ll. 10

– 12 (referring to the “head” and “feet” “of the d eceased”)

, f igs. 3, 9. Although the Board relied on prior art pet caskets to broaden the meaning of “deceased,” those references do not show that the term “deceased ,” standing alone, means anything other than a dead human ; nor do these specialty “pet caskets” undermine the un derstanding of “casket” in the ’ 151 P atent. See U.S. Patent Nos. 3,997,948; D253,975 ; D292,839

. The Board in an IPR typically uses the “ broadest reasonable construction” of the claim, see Cuozzo Speed Techs., LLC v. Lee , 136 S. Ct. 2131, 2142 (2016), but given the plain meaning of “d eceased” and the context of the ’151 Patent specification, the Board’s construction of deceased was unreasonably broad. We thus construe “deceased” in the ’151 Patent , as the Board did in its institution decision, as “a dead h uman.”
As the party bearing th e burden of proof, Matthews had to present a case for why Groh ’s ice chest or Watson’s frozen dough container disclosed “an arrangement capable

could include cremated remains in addition to corporeal remains. That issue is thus not bef ore us.MATTHEWS INTERNATION AL CORP

. v. VANDOR CORPORATION 5

of receiving or containing the remains of a deceased.” Matthews’s petition for inter partes review contained no discussion about whether the prior art structures were capable of containing a deceased ; it instead argued that “casket body” carried no patentable weight . And in its petitioner’s reply, Matthews made only the single stat ement, without anything more, tha t “it is clear that human infants can fit into an ‘ice chest’ sized container.” J.A. 381. The Board found that this “unsupported argument is not persuasive.” J.A. 31. We agree, given that this se ntence in Matthew s ’s reply does not even attempt to refer to anything in the Groh or Watson disclosures, let alone present their teachings in a meaningful way to meet the casket body limitation. The claims at issue here may well be unpatentable as obvious in light of prior art disclosing cardboard caskets and disclosing the folding of cardboard boxes in the manner described by the patent . B ut in an inter partes review proceeding, the petitioner bears the burden of proving that issued patent claims are u npatentable by a pre ponderance of the evidence. See 35 U.S.C. § 316(e). With respect to claim 1, Matthews only argued anticipation. We agree with the Board that Matthews’s single conclusory sentence to address the issue of whether a deceased could be contained in the prior art structures failed to meet that burden of proof.

C ONCLUSION We have considered all of Matthews’s other arg uments and find them unpersuasive. For the foregoing

reasons, we affirm the Board’s claim construction of “casket body

, ” except to the extent to which the Board construed “deceased” in its construction to include bodies other than human. We affirm the Board’s determination that Matthews failed to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that the challenged claims of the ’151 Patent are unpatentabl e

. AFFIRMED