Cellspin Soft, Inc. v. Fitbit LLC

Background

Cellspin Soft, Inc. brought seven patent-infringement actions against Fitbit, Inc., Moov, Inc., Nike, Inc., Under Armour, Inc., Fossil Group, Inc., Misfit Inc., Garmin International, Inc., Garmin USA Inc., Nikon Inc., and Nikon Americas, Inc. The asserted patents are U.S. Patent Nos. 8,738,794, 8,892,752, and 9,749,847. The patents concern distributing multimedia content by automatically transferring data from a Bluetooth-enabled capture device to a mobile device and then to internet services.

The order addressed claim construction, which is the court’s determination of the meaning and legal scope of patent claims for use in deciding infringement. The court considered the patent claims, specifications, prosecution histories, and the parties’ arguments at a March 5, 2021 hearing.

Rulings on Claim Terms

Temporal order

The court held that the elements of each asserted claim generally must be performed in the order in which they appear. The court recognized these exceptions:

- Providing a software module in the ’794 Patent may occur in any order before the “detecting and signaling” step. - Sending a data signal in claim 1 of the ’794 Patent may occur simultaneously with transferring new data. - Claim 1 of the ’847 Patent requires an order only for elements following the terms “configured to” and “controls to.”

The court rejected Cellspin’s attempt to raise additional alleged exceptions in supplemental briefing because Cellspin had not identified and substantively presented those disputes earlier. The court separately held that, in claim 1 of the ’752 Patent, encryption must occur after detection and signaling, and that the ’847 Patent’s storing limitations occur before the sending and transferring limitations.

“After the paired connection is established”

The court construed this phrase to mean “after the paired connection is established and maintained on a continuous basis.” It based this construction on statements Cellspin made during patent prosecution to distinguish prior art, including statements that maintaining a continuous Bluetooth connection was central to the invention. The court found that those statements clearly disclaimed systems that did not maintain a continuous paired connection while acquiring new data. The court did not adopt Defendants’ additional proposed limitation concerning other types of data.

“Bluetooth”

The court declined to limit “Bluetooth” to versions available in 2007 or earlier. It concluded that the term has a well-understood meaning independent of any particular version and adopted no further construction beyond rejecting Defendants’ proposed version limitation.

“Paired”

The court construed “paired” as “in the condition of having an exchanged link key (either before connection establishment was requested or during connecting phase).” The parties agreed to replace the word “state” with “condition” in the construction.

“Cryptographically authenticated”

The court construed “cryptographically authenticated” as “verified as legitimate by use of encryption and decryption involving an algorithm.” The term applies to the required authentication of the identity of the Bluetooth-enabled cellular phone in the ’847 Patent.

“Along with”

The court adopted the plain and ordinary meaning of “along with” and rejected Defendants’ proposed limitation that the items must be transferred at the same time. The court explained that the phrase can refer to temporal togetherness or another form of togetherness, such as being sent in the same data stream.

“Polling”

The court construed “polling” as “checking status [of] on a predetermined basis.” The court explained that “predetermined” refers to programming that sets the frequency of status checks, including fixed intervals, dynamically changing intervals, or randomly selected intervals, so long as the polling is programmed rather than erratic.

“Data signal” and “event notification[s]”

The court construed “data signal” and “event notification[s]” corresponding to the existence of new data as “an indication of the presence of newly acquired data.” It rejected Defendants’ proposed requirement that the signal or notification be sent immediately when the device acquires the data. The court noted that the ’752 Patent expressly allows an event notification to be sent later if notifications were not previously enabled.

“Applying,” “attaching,” and “attach”

The court adopted the plain and ordinary meaning of these terms and rejected Defendants’ proposal to limit them to “embedding” information into the data. The court concluded that the prosecution history did not impose that limitation on the claims at issue.

Other Motions and Disposition

Cellspin’s motion to strike Defendants’ rebuttal expert declaration was denied as moot because the court did not rely on the declaration. The parties’ joint motion to schedule a technology tutorial was denied as moot because the tutorial had already occurred. The order terminated the docket entries listed in the conclusion for the seven related cases. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers entered the order on April 14, 2021.