The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed the
district court's decision that the claim term "visually
negligible" was indefinite because the specification provided
examples of visually negligible indicators, and concluded that
neither the examiners nor the experts during prosecution and
reexamination had apparent difficulty determining the scope of this
term. Sonix Technology Co., Ltd. v. Publications International,
Ltd., Case No. 16-1449 (Fed. Cir., Jan. 5, 2017) (Lourie,
J.).
The patent at issue describes a system and method for using a
"graphical indicator" to encode information on the
surface of an object. The inventor recognized that encoding
information on the surface of an object is not new. For example,
the patent describes a bar code as a conventional example of a
graphical indicator. However, the patent purports to improve on
conventional methods by rendering the graphical indicator visually
negligible. Specifically, the graphical indictor
