Apple Inc. v. Motorola, Inc., No. 11C 8540, Slip Op. (N.D. Ill. Jun. 5, 2012) (Posner, J. sitting by designation).
In light of the interest in this case because of both the high profile parties and the fact that Seventh Circuit Judge Posner is presiding over the case, I am going to go out of order and profile a significant number of opinions from this case during June and July.
Judge Posner granted plaintiff’s (collectively “Apple”) motion for summary judgment of noninfringement of claim 5 of U.S. Patent No. 6,175,559 (the “559 patent”) teaching the creation of a preamble sequence in CDMA code for cellphones. The Court previously required that step 3 of the claim – multiplying inner and outer codes to form a preamble sequence – must come after the first two steps – forming outer and inner codes, respectively. Apple argued that its outer and inner codes were not fully formed before generation of the preamble sequence. Instead Apple created a digit of inner and outer code at a time and used each digit to create a single digit of the preamble sequence. Motorola acknowledged that there was no literal infringement, but argued doctrine of equivalents. But the Court held that the specific exclusion principle prevented using the doctrine of equivalents because in this instance it would vitiate the claim litigation.