The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Court has had a busy February and March, rendering more than 50 decisions in only the first half of this month. One decision, in particular, stands out for the patent application draftsperson: Pacing Technologies v. Garmin Intern., No. 2014-1396, 2015 WL 668828 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 18, 2015) .

In Pacing, the Federal Circuit affirmed the district court's grant of summary judgment that Garmin's accused products do not infringe the asserted claims of Pacing's U.S. Patent No. 8,101,843. Pacing's patent is directed to a system for pacing a user and, more specifically, the patent describes a system for pacing users during activities that involve repeated motions, such as running, cycling and swimming. Preferably, the system provides the user with a tempo (for instance, the beat of a song, or flashes of light) corresponding to the user's desired pace.

Garmin's accused products, the Garmin GPS fitness watches and microcomputers, used by runners and bikers, allow users to assign a duration and target pace value to certain workouts consisting of a series of intervals. The devices display the intervals of a particular workout during operation, for example, by counting down the time for which the user intends to maintain a particular pace.

Patent Language

To establish patent infringement, a patentee must establish by a preponderance of the evidence that an accused device infringes at least one valid claim of the asserted patent. In Pacing, claim 25 of the patent was representative and reads: