Settlements Ready With Infringers!!! Oh my goodnes

Settlements Ready With Infringers!!! Oh my goodness!!!

Claim Construction:

While the parties were briefing SecureAuth’s motion to dismiss, the parties were also engaged in claim construction proceedings. As StrikeForce explained to the district court, the constructions of “interception device,” “security computer,” “host computer,” “first/access channel,” “second/authentication channel,” and “multichannel security system” were relevant to SecureAuth’s motion to dismiss. While the district court dismissed the case just before the Markman hearing, these patents have also been the subject of prior claim construction proceedings.

The Asserted Patents have been asserted in both past and ongoing patent infringement lawsuits, involving nine sets of defendants, in Delaware, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and the Eastern District of Virginia. A number of these defendants have already reached settlements with StrikeForce. No defendant other than SecureAuth filed a motion to dismiss on Section 101 grounds.

The other district courts had construed and read the inventive concept out of the Asserted Claims. The district court ruled on the motion to dismiss just days before a scheduled Markman hearing, at which these claim construction issues were to be addressed. In prior claim construction proceedings, judges in both the District of Delaware and the District of Massachusetts construed “access channel” (and “first channel”) to mean “an information channel that is separate from and does not share any facilities with the authentication channel.” Similarly, these judges construed “authentication channel” (and “second channel”) to mean “a channel for performing authentication that is separate from and does not share any facilities

Instead, without conducting a separate claim construction analysis, the district court applied a different, broader construction of “channel” that the District of Massachusetts had expressly rejected—concluding that separate “channels” could be satisfied by separate frequencies or time slots on a channel. At the very least, the Court should have considered the parties’ agreed-to constructions. In its motion to dismiss briefing, before the Massachusetts court issued its claim construction order.