Opinion ID: 2796394
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: construction of “when a caller

Text: IS PLACED ON HOLD” During claim construction, the parties sought competing constructions of the term “when a caller is placed on hold,” as that term influenced whether music or message playback had to begin at the time the caller was placed on hold, or could begin at some time prior to, and independent of, when a caller was placed on hold. As used in this term, the word “when” could either mean during a period of time (e.g., she played sports when she was in high school) or at one moment of time (e.g., the lights go on when you flip the switch). The district court construed the term to mean “at the moment a caller is placed on hold.” INFO-HOLD, INC. v. MUZAK LLC 15 Our review of a district court’s claim construction based solely on the patent’s intrinsic record is de novo. Teva Pharm. USA, Inc. v. Sandoz, Inc., 135 S. Ct. 831, 841 (2015). The words of a claim are generally given their ordinary and customary meaning, as understood by one of ordinary skill in the art reading the claims in the context of the specification and prosecution history. Thorner v. Sony Computer Entm’t Am. LLC, 669 F.3d 1362, 1365 (Fed. Cir. 2012). “Claims must be interpreted with an eye toward giving effect to all terms in the claim.” Becton, Dickinson & Co. v. Tyco Healthcare Grp., LP, 616 F.3d 1249, 1257 (Fed. Cir. 2010) (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). We hold that the district court’s construction remains faithful to our principles of construction and is supported by the intrinsic evidence. Claims of the ’374 patent cover actions such as accessing messages from a storage device, providing the accessed messages to the playback device, and playing the messages on the playback device, each occurring “when” the caller is “placed on hold.” See, e.g., ’374 patent, claims 7, 17 (’374 patent reexamination certificate, col. 1 ll. 37 & 48-49; col. 2 l. 61). There is no disclosure that any of these actions, or any other action, occurs before or while the caller is on hold. Every instance of the words “on hold” in the ’374 patent is preceded by the word “placed.” Thus, to construe this term to not require that playback starts at the time the caller is placed on hold, as Info-Hold asks us to do, would be to read the word “placed” out of the claims of the patent. Our precedent prohibits us from adopting such a construction. See Becton, Dickinson, 616 F.3d at 1257. Here, the intrinsic evidence supports the district court’s construction determinations. During reexamination of the ’374 patent, Info-Hold amended the claims by adding the limitation “when a caller is placed on hold” to avoid anticipation by the prior art. Info-Hold argued that the addition of this limitation overcame the prior art 16 INFO-HOLD, INC. v. MUZAK LLC because the prior art did “not teach, or even suggest . . . playing messages or generating signals when callers are placed on hold.” J.A. 473. As claim 7 shows, the generated signals “control” the message playback devices by directing them to access messages and play them back through the output. If the signals themselves are generated “when callers are placed on hold,” as Info-Hold argued during reexamination, then the playback resulting from the control signal must also occur at that time, not before the caller is placed on hold. Thus, both the prosecution history and the claim language support a construction of the term “when a caller is placed on hold” to mean “at the moment the caller is placed on hold.” For these reasons, we affirm the district court’s construction of the term “when a caller is placed on hold.”