Court Opinion

ID: 9477530
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:25:25.743576+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:45:55.320240
License: Public Domain

NICHOLS, Senior Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I find this decision troubling, much as I respect the skilled use of established methods of claim construction. We are up against what we must realistically consider a growing inability of speakers and writers, lawyers, technicians, and laymen, to say what they intend to say with accuracy and clarity.
Taken literally, the claim language is absurd. The electrodes cannot and do not provide low current density to reduce * * * pain. The generators do. House current would not do the job. Resort to the specifications and the prosecution history does not help because the same absurdi-. ty is repeated there. As 1988 claim interpreters, therefore, we must resort, as interpreters of statutes and contracts of recent origin must, to our gut feeling of what the inventor really meant to say.
By the dictionary, the word “provide is often associated with the word “for.” If you “provide for” a hurricane, that does not mean you cause or make a hurricane. Your arrangements must be compatible with a hurricane occurring. Here you must have constant current, without spikes, with pulses greater than 5 milliseconds. The electrodes must then be compatible, but I take it this court means the electrodes must be more than compatible to infringe, i.e., must do more than “provide for.”
I think the trial court, in the language quoted, meant that the low current density of the claims could result from special design means other than the electrodes. That it could be produced with no regard to the electrodes would make meaningless the requirement that the skin-contacting members be nonmetallic. They must be adapted to their function. That the electrodes could produce the desired effect without regard to what reaches them from the generator, i.e., from house current, is equally absurd. Under the court’s remand, the trial court will have to ascertain, by gut feeling, its own or that of witnesses, some notion of a middle ground, or what one skilled in the art would have thought. It is impossible to draw any bright line, impossible for us as it will be for the trial court.
I agree on reversal as to the Heart Aid, but as to the Pace Aid, I think the trial court grappled with the uncertainties involved as well as this court, and as well as will be possible after the remand. In such circumstances, I would have affirmed as to the Pace Aid.