Appeal 2007-2127
Reexamination Control No. 90/006,621
execution," as argued by Patent Owner—it requires "preemptive execution
of a plurality of threads," not just one thread. Although we disagree that
"plurality of threads" can be interpreted to require "two or more, but less
than all" threads, there still must be at least two interruptible threads.
PRIORITY
The rejections
1. The district court decision
The district court held the '603 patent invalid under § 112, first
paragraph, for lack of written description support for "multithreading" and
found that the '604 patent was not entitled to a priority date of 1990 or
earlier. Reiffin v. Microsoft, 270 F. Supp. 2d at 1143. Since the "Detailed
Description" portion of the specification is the same for both the 1994 and
1990 applications, we speculate that the district court did not also hold the
'604 patent to be invalid because the 1994 application, as filed, mentions
"multithreading."
The district court construed "multithreading," defined in the '603
patent (col. 1, lines 24-37), to require at least two threads.
The district court construed "thread" as follows:
"A thread is the execution of a sequence of instructions constituting
one of the possibly many procedures, functions or subroutines within
the program. Further, when interrupted, a thread's context must be
saved and retrievable when a thread is reassigned control of the CPU
and resumes execution."
Id. at 1138. This definition comes from Patent Owner's arguments during
prosecution of the '603 patent. See Reiffin v. Microsoft, 64 USPQ2d at 1115.
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