Claim Limitation Reciting Unspecified ‘Requirements" Indefinite Under § 112(B)

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a district court ruling that a claim in Intellectual Ventures I LLC's patent covering an "application-aware resource allocator" for allocating bandwidth resources to transmit information from software applications over a packet-switched network was invalid as indefinite under 35 U.S.C. § 112(b).

Intellectual Ventures asserted its U.S. Patent No. 6,640,248 against T-Mobile, Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware. T-Mobile contended, among other things, that claim 20 of the '248 patent was invalid as indefinite. The patent specification explained that "Quality of Service" (or "QoS") requirements differ between software applications. For example, some applications may place a priority on error minimization, while other applications may place a priority on communication speed. Claim 20 of the '248 patent states in part: