Appeal No. 2005-2338
Application No. 09/754,001
America Inc v. Kee-Vet Laboratories Inc., 12 USPQ2d 1474, 1476 (Fed. Cir.
1989. Initially we note that appellants’ specification does not define the term
GUID, but rather states “[g]eneration of identifiers such as GUIDs, which may
involve adding date and time to a serial number of a device in a client, is known
and accordingly will not be discussed further.” We decline to accept appellants’
asserted definition as there is no date associated with the Webopedia definition
so we are unable to ascertain if the definition is one that would be used as of the
date of filing of the application. Additionally, our reviewing court has stated that
they view “extrinsic evidence in general as less reliable then the patent and its
prosecution history in determining how to read claim terms, for several reasons.
First, extrinsic evidence is by definition not part of the patent and does not have
the specification’s virtue of being created at the time of patent prosecution for the
purpose of explaining the patent’s scope and meaning” Phillips v. AWH Corp.,
415 F3d 1303, 1308 75 USPQ2d 1321, 1330 (Fed. Cir. 2005). Further, we note
that the definition is not commensurate with appellants’ arguments, we do not
find that the definition limits GUID to “uniquely identifies a user globally across All
systems/services” as argued by appellants, on page 6 of the brief. At best the
definition simply identifies that the identifier can be used for several purposes to
globally identify data, to what universe the term “global” applies is not clear.1
We determine the scope of the claim limitation Global Unique Identifier to
1 Independent of the evidence of record we conducted a search of various
sources of technical definitions and found no definition that supports appellants’
assertion that a GUID “uniquely identifies a user globally across All
systems/services.”
6
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