The CAFC addresses inequitable conduct and misprints in articles

CAFC affirms ND Ill in Intercontinental v. Kellogg:


Kraft Foods Global Brands LLC (now called Intercontinental Great Brands) owns U.S. Patent No. 6,918,532, which issued in 2005 and was supplemented with additional claims on reexamination in 2011. The ’532 patent describes and claims a food package that, after opening, can be resealed to maintain the freshness of the food items inside. Kraft brought this patent-infringement suit against Kellogg North America Co., Keebler Foods Co., and affiliates (collectively, Kellogg) in the Northern District of Illinois. The district court held that Kellogg was entitled to summary judgment of invalidity for obviousness of the asserted claims of the ’532 patent. Intercontinental Great Brands LLC v. Kellogg N. Am. Co., 118 F. Supp. 3d 1022, 1027–42 (N.D. Ill. 2015). The court also held that Kraft was entitled to summary judgment rejecting Kellogg’s counterclaim of unenforceability of the patent due to alleged inequitable conduct by Kraft, chiefly in an ex parte reexamination proceeding. Id. at 1044–45. We affirm.




Text within footnote 3 is of interest:


In this court, Kellogg makes only what amounts to a bare assertion of error on this point, not a meaningful argument for why the district court erred. Kellogg’s Opening Corrected Br. 56–57. For record evidence on the point, Kellogg cites only “Sec. V(C), supra,” which does not exist, and J.A. 4924–26, which does not address inequitable non-disclosure during prosecution. Kellogg has forfeited the point and certainly has not shown error. We do not further address this aspect of the inequitable-conduct issue.



Of interest:


Kraft contends that objective indicia must be evaluated before drawing a conclusion about whether a reasonable jury could find that a relevant skilled artisan had a motivation to combine the prior art, not merely before drawing the ultimate obviousness conclusion. But it cites no precedent so holding. Kraft does cite authorities confirming that, in some cases, objective indicia can be important evidence of obviousness, sometimes even the most important evidence. See, e.g., Plantronics, 724 F.3d at 1355; Crocs, Inc. v. Int’l Trade Comm’n, 598 F.3d 1294, 1310 (Fed. Cir. 2010). And it cites authorities that say, consistent with KSR and Graham, that objective indicia must be considered and given “fair weight” before a legal conclusion on obviousness is drawn.




Of prior art previously considered by the USPTO:



The “enhanced burden” point certainly confirms a practical truth about litigation: persuading a fact finder that an expert agency is incorrect on a proposition is likely to be a greater forensic challenge to the advocate than showing the proposition to be incorrect in the absence of a contrary expert-agency determination. See Sciele Pharma Inc. v. Lupin Ltd., 684 F.3d 1253, 1260–61 (Fed. Cir. 2012) (“[I]t may be harder to meet the clear and convincing burden when the invalidity contention is based upon the same argument on the same reference that the PTO already considered. Importantly, whether a reference was before the PTO goes to the weight of the evidence, and the parties are of course free to, and generally do, make these arguments to the fact finder.”). This court has not, however, ascribed any larger meaning to the “enhanced burden” point, which, the court has explained, does not mean that something more than clear and convincing evidence is required. Id.

In any event, this is not a case in which what the PTO concluded makes a difference, for at least two reasons. First, as the district court explained, the only express analysis of the Machinery Update articles was by the examiner, who rejected the claims. The Board, which upheld the claims, did not expressly consider those articles, but relied instead on a sentence in Packaging News that does not appear in the Machinery Update articles. Intercontinental, 118 F. Supp. 3d at 1028–29. There is no basis for attributing to the Board an implied assessment of the Machinery Update articles. The record before the Board indicates that the Board simply accepted a premise that those articles were redundant of Packaging News, requiring no separate consideration. There is no specific PTO determination of nonobviousness based on the particular prior art now at issue.



30(b)(6) testimony was involved in the cross-appeal by Kellogg:


In its cross-appeal, Kellogg argues that the district court erred when it granted Kraft summary judgment rejecting Kellogg’s inequitable-conduct charge.9 The only issue here concerns the arguments Kraft made about Packaging News to the Board during reexamination. We see no reversible error in the district court’s conclusion that Kellogg’s evidence was insufficient to permit a finding of the intent required for inequitable conduct based on Kraft’s reexamination arguments.

Kellogg’s charge rests on a sentence in the Packaging News article—a short article that was the central focus before the Board, including during oral argument, when the Board was specifically looking at and asking about the brief text. The relevant sentence in that article describes the Re-Seal It packaging as not using “conventional wrapping film.” J.A. 4713. Kellogg says that the sentence is a misprint and that Kraft committed inequitable conduct by not so informing the Board.

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The only alleged wrong is Kraft’s omission of any statement that the sentence in the Packaging News reference on which the Board was directly focusing was actually a misprint. But even if the sentence was a misprint, the district court properly concluded that the record does not
support an inference of deceptive intent under the Therasense standard. Kellogg presents no admission or anything similar indicating that any relevant Kraft officer or representative during the reexamination actually believed the sentence to be a misprint. Kellogg asks for an inference as to what Kraft had to believe, given the disparity of language between the Packaging News article (“without conventional wrapping film,” J.A. 4713) and the 2002 Machinery Update article (“with conventional wrapping film,” J.A. 4424), that Kraft’s counsel had read both articles, and that a representative of a company selling packaging machines that counts Kraft as one of its biggest customers (affiliated with the reexamination requester) testified that, since “we run with conventional film,” it was obvious that the Packaging News sentence was a misprint, J.A. 6427, 6441. But without more evidence of Kraft’s belief, one reasonable inference on the record—especially given Kellogg’s burden of persuasion—is that Kraft did not believe that there was a misprint. Kellogg’s evidence from the deposition of Kraft’s counsel provides no suggestion of any awareness of a misprint. See J.A. 6941–45. The same is true as to Kraft’s inventor—appearing also as Kraft’s official company witness under Fed. R. Civ. P. 30(b)(6)—who testified that she did not recognize a misprint in Packaging News at all, much less one based on the difference in language between it and the 2002 Machinery Update, believing that “they were different packaging in different articles,” J.A. 6388, and that if there had been a misprint, it would have been corrected, J.A. 6382–83. In the reexamination, moreover, neither the ex parte requester nor the examiner suggested that the Packaging News article contained a misprint. The absence of such a statement indicates that the alleged misprint was not as obvious as Kellogg claims.




The partial dissent of Judge Reyna highlights one key issue in the case:



For too long, this court has turned a blind eye to what I consider to be a grave concern: the application of a prima facie test that necessarily achieves a legal determination of obviousness prior to full and fair consideration of evidence of objective indicia of non-obviousness

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I would find that the district court improperly found a prima facie case of obviousness before considering Kraft’s evidence of objective indicia of nonobviousness. I therefore respectfully dissent from Part IIA of the majority opinion



Also, of a changed claim construction:



That midstream change was dispositive, and because Kraft had no opportunity to address the new construction, the district court’s summary judgment was erroneous. I dissent.