Federal Circuit: District Court Properly Struck Expert Testimony that Failed to Apply Agreed-Upon Claim Construction

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) today issued a precedential opinion affirming a district court order that struck parts of an infringement expert report and also granted summary judgment of non-infringement to Valve Corporation. The CAFC held that it is proper to strike expert testimony that did not rely on the agreed upon claim construction adopted by the district court. Treehouse Avatar, LLC owns U.S. Patent 8,180,858, which relates to a method of presenting data based on choices made by users with respect to characters in a network site, such as choosing clothing and hairstyles for the characters. The case turned on the meaning of “character-enabled (CE) network sites” (“CE limitation”) in the claims, which the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) had construed in an earlier inter partes review (IPR) proceeding to mean “a network location, other than a user device, operating under control of a site program to present a character, object, or scene to a user interface.”Read More