Opinion ID: 820394
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: O2 Micro

Text: In addition to arguing the district court’s claim constructions were incorrect, FM maintains that the court improperly sent these constructions to the jury. FM argues that this runs afoul of O2 Micro International v. Beyond Innovation Technology Co., in which we said, “[w]hen the parties present a fundamental dispute regarding the scope of a claim term, it is the court’s duty to resolve it.” 521 F.3d 1351, 1362 (Fed. Cir. 2008). FM raises these arguments for each of the three terms we have construed above, and once again we address each in turn. FM makes two arguments in support of its contention that the construction of the terms “create” and “processing” was submitted to the jury. First, FM contends that the district court’s order denying Google’s request for summary judgment of non-infringement shows that there was an unresolved dispute over claim scope that the district court left to be decided by the jury. This argument has little merit. Even assuming FM may complain about the denial of Google’s motion for summary judgment, we have already explained that the subsequent jury verdict renders the denial of this motion non-final and non-appealable under Fifth Circuit law. We hold that the denial of a pre-trial motion for summary judgment of noninfringement does not, by itself, show that the district court delegated claim construction to the jury. This is 22 FUNCTION MEDIA v. GOOGLE especially true where, as here, the jury was instructed to apply the district court’s claim constructions. FM’s second argument focuses on a point during trial when Google objected to the testimony of FM’s expert. The expert testified that the customization step is separate from the processing step; in Google’s view, this statement ran afoul of the court’s claim construction. FM’s counsel responded that it was Google that was misstating the court’s construction. The court overruled Google’s objection and indicated that it would check the construction and would make correcting statements if the witness was misstating the court’s claim construction. FM urges that the court should have stepped in to correct any misunderstanding at that point because the proper interpretation of “creation” was unresolved. As additional evidence of the confusion, FM asserts that after FM rested its case, Google’s expert pursued differing interpretations of the “creation” element depending on whether he was offering testimony on infringement or anticipation. As a preliminary matter, we must address Google’s argument that FM has waived this issue. Citing Lazare, 628 F.3d at 1376, Google argues that FM waived any complaint about Google’s trial tactics by failing to object. Google asserts that FM may not claim Google’s objection as its own, and that if FM believed that the claim construction order or any other order created ambiguity, it was FM’s responsibility to object. We disagree. In Lazare, the parties stipulated to the meaning of a claim term but presented differing arguments at trial about what it meant to satisfy that term. 628 F.3d at 1375. Nevertheless, this court found that the issue had been waived because neither party had advanced its O2 Micro argument until after trial. See 628 F.3d at 1376 (finding waiver when “[u]nlike O2 Micro where the appellant presented its claim construction argument to the district court during a Markman hearing, FUNCTION MEDIA v. GOOGLE 23 Lazare first asserted the claim construction argument it presses on appeal in a post-trial motion”). Lazare is distinguishable because in this case, the dispute was brought to the district court’s attention during trial and the court heard arguments from both sides. It would hardly make sense to require FM to object to its own testimony on a point that was in accord with the claim construction that it had proposed and that the court had adopted. On the merits, Google responds with a single argu- ment covering all three of the O2 Micro problems alleged by FM: that this is not a case, like O2 Micro, in which the parties disputed the scope of the claims, but rather a posttrial attempt to re-characterize improper arguments as issues of claim construction, like Verizon Services Corp. v. Cox Fibernet Virginia, Inc., 602 F.3d 1325 (Fed. Cir. 2010). In O2 Micro, the parties disagreed during claim construction about whether the term “only if” included two specific exceptions. 521 F.3d at 1361-62. The “district court acknowledged that this dispute over the scope of the asserted claims ‘boil[ed] down to whether . . . there can be an exception,’” but refused to construe the term and determine whether there were exceptions because “only if” “ha[d] a well-understood definition, capable of application by both the jury and this court in considering the evidence submitted in support of an infringement or invalidity case.” Id. at 1361. Because the district court did not settle the dispute, the parties presented their arguments to the jury. Id. at 1362. Examining these arguments, this court concluded that “the parties disputed not the meaning of the words themselves, but the scope that should be encompassed by this claim language.” Id. Because “determining the meaning and scope of the patent claims” is a question that “the court, not the jury, must resolve,” id. at 1360, we held that the submission of these differing claim scope arguments to the jury was 24 FUNCTION MEDIA v. GOOGLE error and remanded for the district court to construe the claim in the first instance. Id. at 1363. In Verizon, a patent owner relied on O2 Micro to support its argument that a new trial was required. The relevant claims had been construed before trial, and neither party argued that the constructions were incorrect. 602 F.3d at 1332. After trial, the owner sought an instruction that the scope of the claim terms did not depend on the subjective intent of the inventor in using those terms. Id. As grounds for this request, the owner pointed to “places where [defense] counsel and its experts referred to statements of the inventors and then distinguished [the defendant’s] system from the asserted claims based on those statements.” Id. This court distinguished O2 Micro in two ways: (1) that the parties did not bring a dispute about claim scope to the district court’s attention prior to the close of evidence, and (2) that the parties did not “not invite the jury to choose between alternative meanings of technical terms or words of art or to decide the meaning of a particular claim term.” Id. at 1334. We concluded that “[w]hile [the owner] attempts to characterize the issue as one of claim construction, its argument is more accurately about whether [the defendant’s] arguments to the jury . . . were improper.” Id. In other words, Verizon presented a question of improper attorney arguments, not an O2 Micro problem. See id. We conclude that, as in Verizon, this issue in this case is whether there were improper arguments, not whether questions of claim scope were submitted to the jury. As in Verizon, the jury was explicitly told by the court to use only the court’s claim constructions. Additionally, like the appellant in Verizon, FM had the opportunity to object during trial or request limiting instructions, but never did so. See 602 F.3d at 1335. The only difference here is that during its closing arguments, FM accused Google of playing “word games.” J.A. 19172-74, 19213. Nearly every patent case will involve some amount of “word FUNCTION MEDIA v. GOOGLE 25 games,” because claims and claim constructions are, after all, just words. But FM’s argument, if accepted, would make almost every case in which the parties’ arguments did not directly quote the court’s claim construction ripe for remand and new trial. We are confident that such situations should be rare. See Kinetic Concepts, Inc. v. Blue Sky Med. Grp., Inc., 554 F.3d 1010, 1019 n.4 (Fed. Cir. 2009) (“While [O2 Micro] permits a remand for further claim construction, it does not require one.”). As with the “creation” and “processing” terms, FM also argues that the court left the “selection” term for the jury. As evidence, FM cites a situation similar to what happened with the “creation” and “processing” terms in which Google objected to the form of FM’s expert’s testimony on claim construction grounds, the judge overruled the objection, and the judge did not revisit its construction later. FM suggests that Google’s objections “forced” FM to argue claim differentiation to the jury by questioning Google’s expert on claim 90 and its relationship to the other claims. FM also argues the claim construction problem went to the jury because Google argued in closing that “the Court has said that the ad must be displayed on each of the selected media venues” which “does not happen on the Google system.” Appellant’s Br. 50 (quoting J.A. 1919899). These arguments too are belied by our decision in Verizon. The court accepted FM’s proposed claim construction and FM neither identified a problem with the construction nor requested further interpretation during trial. See Verizon, 602 F.3d at 1334 (“Unlike O2 Micro, where the scope of a specific claim term was in dispute beginning at the Markman hearing and continuing throughout the trial, [the appellant] never identified at any time during the proceedings before the district court any specific claim term that was misconstrued or that 26 FUNCTION MEDIA v. GOOGLE needed further construction.”). FM’s complaint about Google’s closing is irrelevant because that statement had to do with whether ads are published, not which entity selects where ads are published. Thus, FM is not entitled to a new trial when it failed to request further construction of the “selection” term. See Cordis Corp. v. Boston Scientific Corp., 561 F.3d 1319, 1338-39 (Fed. Cir. 2009) (finding waiver when the party failed to ask for further construction of a term within a previously construed element). With regard to the final term, “publishing,” FM argues Google incorrectly argued throughout the trial that the claims require the ad be published to the media venue’s physical servers. We disagree with FM that claim construction was decided by the jury because the district court’s construction was correct, and the district court never refused to construe any disputed terms. Moreover, as with the other terms, FM never objected to any supposed improper argument or testimony. In Verizon, we turned to the relevant circuit’s law to determine whether improper arguments to which no objection was made required a new trial. 602 F.3d at 1334-35. In this case, we look to the law of the Fifth Circuit, which has held that the “Court will consider errors to which no objections were made at trial but will exercise this power only in exceptional cases where the interest of substantial justice is at stake. To reverse, this Court must find plain error.” Shipman v. Cent. Gulf Lines, Inc., 709 F.2d 383, 388 (5th Cir. 1983) (internal citations omitted). FM has not demonstrated that misstatements during trial by Google’s counsel or witnesses were sufficiently erroneous to make this case exceptional. Nor has FM argued that substantial interests of justice are at stake. Thus, we cannot say that the district court plainly erred in denying a new trial. FUNCTION MEDIA v. GOOGLE 27 We have evaluated FM’s arguments and find that none of them compel us to remand for a new trial. The district court correctly construed the terms and instructed the jury to apply its constructions. FM has not persuaded us that any issues of claim scope were submitted to the jury, and we therefore conclude that no O2 Micro problems are present in this case.