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Timestamp: 2019-04-20 14:41:51+00:00

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FindACase | Biscotti Inc. v. Microsoft Corp.
Biscotti Inc. v. Microsoft Corp.
RODNEY GILSTRAP, UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE.
Before the Court is Plaintiff Biscotti, Inc.'s (“Biscotti”) Motion for Judgment as a Matter of Law and New Trial (the “Motion”) (Dkt. No. 318). Having considered the Motion, and for the reasons set forth herein, the Court concludes that the Motion should be and hereby is DENIED.
On August 22, 2016, the Court lifted the stay, set the case for trial, and referred it to Magistrate Judge Roy S. Payne for pretrial proceedings. (Dkt. No. 101.) The Parties then engaged in extensive motion practice.
After a jury trial on the merits, a party may file a motion for judgment as a matter of law or in the alternative for a new trial. Fed.R.Civ.P. 50(b).
“A motion for judgment as a matter of law [under Rule 50(b)] is a challenge to the legal sufficiency of the evidence supporting the jury's verdict.” Erfindergemeinschaft UroPep GbR v. Eli Lilly & Co., 276 F.Supp.3d 629, 643 (E.D. Tex. 2017) (“UroPep”) (Bryson, J., sitting by designation). Entry of judgment as a matter of law is therefore only appropriate when “there is no legally sufficient evidentiary basis for a reasonable jury to find as the jury did.” Guile v. United States, 422 F.3d 221, 225 (5th Cir. 2005); see also Baisden v. I'm Ready Prods., Inc., 693 F.3d 491, 498 (5th Cir. 2012) (“A district court must deny a motion for judgment as a matter of law unless the facts and inferences point so strongly and overwhelmingly in the movant's favor that reasonable jurors could not reach a contrary conclusion.” (emphasis added, internal quotation marks removed)).
“In evaluating a motion for judgment as a matter of law, a court must ‘draw all reasonable inferences in the light most favorable to the verdict.'” Metaswitch Networks Ltd. v. Genband U.S. LLC, No. 2:14-CV-00744-JRG, 2017 WL 3704760, at *2 (E.D. Tex. Aug. 28, 2017) (quoting E.E.O.C. v. Boh Bros. Const. Co., L.L.C., 731 F.3d 444, 451 (5th Cir. 2013)). Courts must also avoid the temptation of revisiting credibility determinations or reweighing evidence. Id. Such determinations are, appropriately, left to the jury. Montano v. Orange Cty., Texas, 842 F.3d 865, 874 (5th Cir. 2016) (“[I]t is for the jury alone to judge the credibility of witnesses and weigh the evidence.”).
A motion for a new trial under Rule 50(b) is essentially an invocation of Rule 59, which provides that a new trial may be granted on all or part of the issues on which there has been a trial by jury for “any reason for which a new trial has heretofore been granted in an action at law in federal court.” Fed.R.Civ.P. 59(a). Notwithstanding the broad sweep of Rule 59, “courts do not grant new trials unless it is reasonably clear that prejudicial error has crept into the record or that substantial justice has not been done, and the burden of showing harmful error rests on the party seeking the new trial.” Metaswitch, No. 2:14-CV-00744-JRG, 2017 WL 3704760, at *2; UroPep, 276 F.Supp.3d at 643. “A new trial may be granted, for example, if the district court finds the verdict is against the weight of the evidence, the damages awarded are excessive, the trial was unfair, or prejudicial error was committed in its course.” Smith v. Transworld Drilling Co., 773 F.2d 610, 612-13 (5th Cir. 1985); see also Laxton v. Gap Inc., 333 F.3d 572, 586 (5th Cir. 2003) (“A new trial is warranted if the evidence is against the great, and not merely the greater, weight of the evidence.”).
At trial, Microsoft raised three non-infringement arguments. Biscotti now moves for judgment as a matter of law on the basis that no reasonable jury could have credited these non-infringement theories.
Given that neither party sought a construction of “a storage medium” or “the at least one processor” before trial, the Court will not provide a new construction now. Wi-Lan, 811 F.3d at 465. Instead, the Court considers whether a reasonable jury could have found no infringement based on the evidence presented at trial and the claims themselves. At trial, Biscotti's expert, Dr. Wicker, testified that the “at least one processor” and “storage medium” limitations were satisfied by a particular processor and a particular storage medium in the Xbox One, not a combination of various processors and storage mediums. (Dkt. No. 287, 6/6/17 A.M. Trial Tr. at 54:3-11, 68:3- 9, 69:15-24.) A reasonable jury could have therefore concluded that to find infringement the instructions had to be contained on the processor and the storage medium about which Dr. Wicker testified. This conclusion is consistent with the claims, which refer, as Dr. Wicker did, to a particular storage medium and a particular processor rather than various processors and storage mediums in separate computer systems. This conclusion is also consistent with the evidence, as explained above.
As with several other issues in this case, the dispute here turns, at least in part, on competing constructions for a term that neither party sought to have construed prior to trial. The Court therefore considers whether the plain and ordinary meaning, combined with the evidence, supports a finding of non-infringement. Wi-Lan, 811 F.3d at 465. It does. Claim 6 requires the instructions on the storage medium to relate to “encoding the captured video stream.” (PTX-1 at 33:18-19.) Dr. Wicker acknowledged that because of the encoding that takes place on the Kinect, the video stream that is captured by the Kinect is not the same as the video stream encoded by the Xbox One. (Dkt. No. 288, 6/6/17 P.M. Trial Tr. at 43:1-7 (“Q. But the trade-off in an MJPEG is when you compress it down, it's small, but when you go to open it back up, it's not going to be the same thing because you've lost certain of your pixels; is that fair? A. Yes. When you - by allowing for a little loss, you can compress a lot more. And what you get back is slightly different. That's the price you pay.”).) From this testimony, and the evidence generally, a reasonable jury could have concluded that the Xbox One processor does not include instructions for encoding “the captured video stream” that is captured by the Kinect. Moreover, even if “the captured video stream” refers to a previously encoded or processed stream, a reasonable jury could have concluded that the extent of processing in this case means that the two streams are not the same, as Dr. Wicker admitted, or even sufficiently similar.

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