Appeal 2006-1865
Application 09/660,433
Patent 5,802,641
art at the time of the amendment. Therefore, in determining whether
an alleged equivalent would have been unforeseeable, a district court
may hear expert testimony and consider other extrinsic evidence
relating to the relevant factual inquiries.
. . . As we have held in the Warner-Jenkinson context, that reason
should be discernible from the prosecution history record, if the public
notice function of a patent and its prosecution history is to have
significance. See id. at 1356 (“Only the public record of the patent
prosecution, the prosecution history, can be a basis for [the reason for
the amendment to the claim]. Otherwise, the public notice function of
the patent record would be undermined.”); Festo [I], 234 F.3d at 586
(“In order to give due deference to public notice considerations under
the Warner-Jenkinson framework, a patent holder seeking to establish
the reason for an amendment must base his arguments solely upon the
public record of the patent’s prosecution, i.e., the patent’s prosecution
history. To hold otherwise--that is, to allow a patent holder to rely on
evidence not in the public record to establish a reason for an
amendment--would undermine the public notice function of the patent
record.”). Moreover, whether an amendment was merely tangential to
an alleged equivalent necessarily requires focus on the context in
which the amendment was made; hence the resort to the prosecution
history. Thus, whether the patentee has established a merely
tangential reason for a narrowing amendment is for the court to
determine from the prosecution history record without the
introduction of additional evidence, except, when necessary,
testimony from those skilled in the art as to the interpretation of that
record.
. . . When at all possible, determination of the third rebuttal criterion
should also be limited to the prosecution history record. . . . We need
not decide now what evidence outside the prosecution history record,
if any, should be considered in determining if a patentee has met its
burden under this third rebuttal criterion.
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