Business Objects v. Microstrategy: insight into Festo

In Business Objects v. Microstrategy, there is an example of an amendment which is not a narrowing amendment and which thus escapes the reach of Festo. This gives a prosecution strategy for evading Festo: when faced with an issue with one claim element, eliminate it entirely and use another claim element.

US Patent 5,555,403 at issue was an improvement for searching relational databases and the case includes some discussion of SQL (structured query language).

The district court's claim constructions were upheld, but the district court missed the fact that the one amendment was not a narrowing amendment.