Federal Circuit backs IBM in software dispute

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has backed technology company IBM in its patent dispute against computer software company Twin Peaks Software.

In a decision handed down on Friday, May 26, the court upheld a finding by the US District Court for the Northern District of California that a patent owned by Twin Peaks was invalid as indefinite.

US patent number 7,418,439, directed to “a virtual file system that links two or more file systems together and mirrors between them in real time” (a mirror file system), was the patent involved in the clash.

Twin Peaks had claimed that IBM’s products using “a technology called both ‘Panache’ and ‘Active File Management’” infringed the patent.
The district court held a claim construction hearing and construed two limitations, for claim 1 (the “means for mounting” limitation) and 4 (the “mechanism for managing” limitation), finding that the claim limitations were “insufficiently specific”.

For claim 1, the court found that the specification only disclosed the result, rather than how to achieve the result.

On claim 4, the court concluded that the specification failed to provide sufficient disclosure “to render the bounds of the claim understandable to one of ordinary skill in the art” and that the “mechanism for managing” limitation was indefinite.

Twin Peaks appealed, challenging the district court’s indefiniteness determinations.

But the Federal Circuit upheld the court’s decision, finding that the limitations were indefinite and therefore that the claims were invalid.