Opinion ID: 2720188
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Order-of-Steps Requirement in the

Text: Claim Construction We now turn to the issue of whether claim 1 of the ’917 patent requires that a connection be completely established before transmission. As a general rule, “[u]nless the steps of a method [claim] actually recite an order, the steps are not ordinarily construed to require one.” Interactive Gift Express, Inc. v. Compuserve Inc., 256 F.3d 1323, 1342 (Fed. Cir. 2001) (citation omitted). However, a claim “requires an ordering of steps when the claim language, as a matter of logic or grammar, requires that the steps be performed in the order written, or the specification directly or implicitly requires” an order of steps. TALtech Ltd. v. Esquel Apparel, Inc., 279 F. App’x 974, 978 (Fed. Cir. 2008); see also Function Media, LLC v. Google, Inc., 708 F.3d 1310, 1320 (Fed. Cir. 2013) (concluding that a claim that recites “processing” an “electronic advertisement” necessarily indicates that “the creation of the ad must happen before the processing begins”). Below, the district court read an order-of-steps requirement into the claim, concluding that “before the MFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES, INC. v. RESEARCH IN MOTION 13 LTD. server can ‘transmit’ the command, it must first ‘establish a connection’” that is used for transmitting. J.A. 89. The district court explained that, “[i]n the context of a network communication, the ordinary meaning of the phrase ‘a connection’ is ‘a means of communication or transport.’” J.A. 87 (citing Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary 278 (1983)). On appeal, Mformation challenges the district court’s construction. It argues that the patentee’s use of “ing” in “establishing a connection between the wireless device and the server” conveys that formation of the connection is in progress, rather than completed. And Mformation adds that the wherein clause does not specifically dictate when the connection must be established; it only requires that a connection eventually be established. Further, the word “established” is distant from the “establishing a connection” sub-step. According to Mformation, this serves as evidence that completely establishing a connection is not required before transmission. See Credle v. Bond, 25 F.3d 1566, 1571 (Fed. Cir. 1994) (stating that “grammatical structure and syntax” of the claim can be important evidence for claim construction). Thus, Mformation claims that the point of the “wherein” limitation was to define the subset of factors that could trigger the establishment of the connection—not to create rigid step-ordering requirements. BlackBerry responds that the result of performing the “establishing a connection” sub-step is necessarily that a connection is “established.” And BlackBerry claims the presence of the “wherein” clause strongly reinforces that conclusion. According to BlackBerry, if the “establishing a connection” sub-step were not temporally distinct from the transmitting sub-step (and prior to it), there would be no reason to specify a separate sub-step for establishing a connection at all, as it is inherently part of transmitting a command. 14 MFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES, INC. v. RESEARCH IN MOTION LTD. BlackBerry also points to a passage in the specification that contains the only description of the “establishing a connection” sub-step: In particular, in step 408, a connection 516 is es- tablished between management agent 504, run- ning on remotely managed device 502, and management server 508. Upon connection 516 be- ing established, the commands that were stored in the mailbox 512 in step 406 are transmitted 518 to device 502. ’917 patent col. 6 ll. 32-38 (emphasis added). We agree with the district court and BlackBerry that claim 1 requires that a connection be established before transmission. We are persuaded by BlackBerry’s argument that the separate sub-step for establishing a connection would become “superfluous” if we concluded that a connection did not have to be established (completed) before transmission. That is because, under such construction of the claim, establishing a connection is necessarily encompassed in transmitting a command. See Aristocrat Techs. Australia Pty Ltd. v. Int’l Game Tech., 709 F.3d 1348, 1356-57 (Fed. Cir. 2013) (declining to adopt the appellants’ proposed construction because it would render another limitation “superfluous”). Further, we note that other sub-steps in claim 1 inherently require an order-of-steps. As a matter of logic, a mailbox must be established before the contents of said mailbox can be transmitted. See Oral Arg. 12:52-14:30 available at http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/oral-argumentrecordings/12-1679/all (“You can’t accept something before it’s transmitted . . . this claim has at least some temporal limitations . . . .”). And while it is true that “we have expressly rejected the contention that if a patent describes only a single embodiment, the claims of the patent must be construed as being limited to that embodiment,” Phillips v. AWH Corp., 415 F.3d 1303, 1323 (Fed. Cir. 2005) MFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES, INC. v. RESEARCH IN MOTION 15 LTD. (en banc) (citation omitted), we do note that our conclusion is consistent with the sole embodiment in the specification. See ’917 patent col. 6 ll. 32-38.