“One,” But Not the One and Only

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a lower court’s summary judgment ruling of infringement of certain patent claims, concluding that the lower court had properly construed disputed claim terms leading to the finding.IGT v. Bally Gaming Int’l, Inc., Case Nos. 10-1364, -1365 (Fed. Cir., Oct. 6, 2011) (Moore, J.).

The plaintiff IGT alleged infringement by Bally Gaming of two patents relating to systems for controlling networked gaming devices, which are connected to floor controllers that monitor gaming activity.The patents describe methods for rewarding players over and above the normal device payouts.IGT accused Bally of infringing the claims of these patents when Bally offers two promotions—Power Rewards and Power Winners.The district court, after construing a number of claim terms, determined, as a matter of law, that the Power Rewards promotion infringed certain claims of both patents and that the Power Winners promotion infringed the claims of one of the patents.Bally appealed the lower court’s ruling, arguing that the district court erred in its claim construction, inter alia, of the claim term “one.”

The Federal Circuit reviewed the lower court’s claim constructions de novo. One of the asserted claims required “issuing a command over the network to one of said preselected gaming devices” and “paying at said one gaming device in accordance with the command.”Bally, disagreeing with the lower court’s construction, argued that the term “one” should be construed to mean “one and only one,” i.e., that the command must be sent to one and only one machine during a promotional period.Bally argued that its products do not infringe because they pay at more than one gaming device.

The Federal Circuit disagreed.The court construed the term “one” in the context of the words that surrounded it, i.e., as the term is used in the claim.In the Court’s view, the claim covered a system in which a single command is issued to a single gaming device and causes that same device to pay in response to the command.The Court rejected Bally’s argument that attempted to limit the number of commands that could be issued to discrete gaming devices.Nothing in the limitation, concluded the Court, required issuing only one command to only one machine.Therefore, the Federal Circuit agreed with the lower court’s construction of “one” and affirmed the ruling of summary judgment of infringement.

The Federal Circuit went on to analyze four other disputed claim terms that Bally argued were incorrectly construed by the lower court.In each case, the court concluded that, the district court had correctly construed the terms.Although the court modified the construction of a term that IGT argued was misconstrued, it declined to reverse the lower court’s finding of non-infringement.