Apple has successfully defended itself against claims that it infringed two Bluetooth pairing patents relating to AirPods. The claim was a ridiculous one, but might have succeeded on a technical point of law. Fortunately, sanity prevailed when the appeal judge decided to apply a commonsense test.
One-E-Way held two patents for a system of generating a “unique user code,” which is sent to a headphone to enable it to pair with the other device …
The ridiculousness of the claim is that this is, of course, how Bluetooth pairing works. When you pair an iPhone to a set of AirPods, for example, the two devices exchange codes in order to allow the wireless connection. The company had already lost its claim against Apple in district court, but appealed to the Federal Circuit.
One-E-Way’s patents describe a code that is unique to a user rather than a device. PatentlyO explains that the company had argued the two things were equivalent.
One-E-Way contended that even though the Bluetooth address codes are associated with devices, the codes are still associated with individual users through operation of the device. In other words, One-E-Way argued that Bluetooth pairing to a particular device is equivalent to pairing with a specific user. This argument makes the assumption that each device is limited to just “one user.”
Certainly in the case of in-ear headphones like AirPods, that claim might technically have succeeded, since very few people will share these devices between more than one person.
However, the judge decided that it was appropriate to look at “the ordinary meaning” of the phrase – and on that basis, a unique user code is not the same as a unique device code.
The language of the report is quite amusing. There’s a legal term known as “construction,” which describes the process of interpreting wording used in a legal document. In this case, there was no argument between the parties about the literal definition of a “unique user code” – its construction – but they did disagree about the effective meaning of the term, or in legal terminology, the construction of the construction!
Although the parties had agreed to the construction of the “unique user code” term, they disagreed over the construction-of-the-construction. On appeal, the court treated this meta-construction effectively as a form of claim construction — looking for the ordinary meaning rather than a contract-like interpretation that would have looked more toward discerning the intent of the parties.
Or, in ordinary language, a user and a device are different things, even if a device is only used by a single user. So no, One-E-Way doesn’t own a Bluetooth pairing patent.
Photo: David Levêque/Unsplash
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