Adrian Speck QC, Mark Chacksfield QC and Edmund Eustace appeared for the claimants (“InterDigital”) and James Abrahams QC and William Duncan appeared for the defendants (“Lenovo”) in Trial B in the ongoing proceedings between these parties. In the wider proceedings, InterDigital seeks to have the Court determine the terms of a FRAND licence of its portfolio of mobile telephony patents said to be standards essential.
Trial B was the technical trial of a single patent in the portfolio which relates to a feature of high speed uplink packet access (“HSUPA”) and the way in which data is assembled for transmission for the purposes of 3G. Specifically, the patent sought to minimise the amount of “padding” required to ensure data blocks match the pre-determined PDU size for transmission. Lenovo challenged the novelty and inventiveness of the patent on the basis of a single piece of prior art (“Filiatrault”) comprising a marked up version of a 3G technical specification circulated by Mr Filiatrault to the members of the Radio Access Network Working Group 2 (RAN2).
Mellor J rejected Lenovo’s literal construction of the patent claims, finding that the skilled person would not read the terms without regards to the technical context. The judge rejected Lenovo’s obviousness attack on the basis that the expert evidence supporting Lenovo’s case involved a level of hindsight. However, the judge upheld Lenovo’s separate novelty attack in relation to claim 1 of the patent. Specifically, he held that 3G operates on various protocols and, in certain circumstances, Filiatrault was capable of achieving the result required by claim 1 of the patent, as construed by the judge. Therefore, the patent was invalid for lack of novelty, and for that reason not infringed by Lenovo and not capable of being essential to the 3G standard.