FEDERAL CIRCUIT PATENT LAW CASE UPDATE
Chef Am. v. Lamb-Weston, 03-1279 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 20, 2004) (Friedman, J.)
Agreeing with the district court’s claim construction, the court affirmed a summary judgment
non-infringement determination. Chef America asserted its patent for a dough making process against
Lamb-Weston. The claim term in dispute described heating the dough to a specified temperature range,
the issue being whether this indicated the temperature of the dough or the oven. The better construction
was the dough, because the court did not feel compelled to rewrite the claim to save operability,
allowing Lamb-Weston to avoid infringement liability.
Chef America owns U.S. Pat. No. 4,761,290,
directed to a process for making dough that
cooks to a “light, flaky, crispy texture.” One of
the claimed process steps heated the dough.
The court introduced the appeal as follows.
The sole issue in this appeal is the
meaning of the following language in a
patent claim: “heating the resulting
batter-coated dough to a temperature in
the range of about 400° F. to 850° F.”
The question is whether the dough itself
is to be heated to that temperature (as the
district court held), or whether the claim
only specifies the temperature at which
the dough is to be heated, i.e., the
temperature of the oven (as the appellant
contends). We agree with the district
court that the claim means what it says
(the dough is to be heated “to” the
designated temperature range) and
therefore affirm. . . .
These are ordinary, simple English
words whose meaning is clear and
unquestionable. There is no indication
that their use in this particular
conjunction changes their meaning.
They mean exactly what they say. The
dough is to be heated to the specified
temperature. Nothing even remotely
suggests that what is to be heated is not
the dough but the air inside the oven in
which the heating takes place. Indeed,
the claim does not even refer to an oven.
...
The problem is that if the batter-coated
dough is heated to a temperature range
of 400° F. to 850° F., as the claim
instructs, it would be burned to a crisp.
Instead of the “dough products suitable
for freezing and finish cooking to a light,
flaky, crispy texture,” ’290 patent, col. 2,
ll. 11-12, which the patented process is
intended to provide, the resultant product
of such heating will be something that,
in the words of one of the attorneys in
this case, resembles a charcoal briquet.
To avoid this result and to insure that the
patented process can accomplish its
stated objective, Chef America urges us
to interpret the claim. . . .
This court, however, repeatedly and
consistently has recognized that courts
may not redraft claims, whether to make
them operable or to sustain their validity.
In addition, there was nothing in the patent to
suggest that the applicant acted as a
lexicographer to assign a unique meaning to the
claim terms in dispute. Chef America’s expert
testimony about the meaning of the claim
language was not persuasive, in part because the
expert did not treat the language as a term of art
for the baking industry.
The University of Houston Law Center’s Institute for Intellectual Property and
Information Law is pleased to provide this information on patent law decisions.
© 2004 Greg R. Vetter. All rights reserved. Fully attributed noncommercial
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