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A federal appellate court has considered a trial court’s ruling that Move, Inc., the operator of realtor.com, did not infringe a patent owned by the Real Estate Alliance, Ltd. (“REAL”).
Move, Inc. (“Move”) operates a number of leading real estate websites, including realtor.com. (owned by the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® (“NAR”)) and the property listing website of the National Association of Home Builders (“NAHB”).
In 2007, Move brought a lawsuit against REAL seeking a declaratory judgment that the websites Move operates do not infringe REAL’s patents. REAL’s patents allegedly involve a process for locating properties on a map via a computer. The trial court denied REAL’s attempt to have the case certified as a class action, and also entered judgment that Move did not infringe either of REAL’s patents. REAL appealed the ruling as to one of the patents.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed the trial court and sent the case back to the trial court. The court examined the trial court’s claim construction of the patent. Claim construction is the term of art describing the process courts use to construe the claims of a patent in order to give them meaning. The claim construction is then compared to the allegedly infringing device or method to determine infringement or to prior art to determine validity.
The court ruled that the trial court had improperly construed the language in the patent’s first step, “creating a database of the available real estate properties.” The trial court construed this claim as describing a process used to create a database used to store property information, not a database comprised of property information. The court noted that the patent stated it was for “a database…of…properties” and so did not have the limited meaning that the trial court had prescribed.
Next, the court examined the language “selecting a first area having boundaries.” The trial court had construed this language as stating that the user would manually create the search area using a cursor tool. The court ruled that this construction was too narrow, as the patent language did not require the user to define the area, and the area could be selected by either the user or a computer. Thus, the court reversed this claim construction as well.
The court then examined the language “zooming in on the first area of the displayed map to about the boundaries of the first area to display a higher level of detail than the displayed map.” The trial court had construed this language as involving zooming on the displayed map within the boundaries previously selected by the user in order to see greater detail. REAL argued that the patent language described more than simple magnification, but instead included provided “higher level of detail” about the property. The court agreed that this step included providing more detail about the property and so agreed with REAL’s construction of this step.
Finally, the court looked at the following language: “displaying the second area and a plurality of points within the second area, each point representing the appropriate geographic location of an available real estate property.” The trial court determined that this language was intended to allow the user to further highlight properties within a previously selected area. REAL argued that the language did not limit the “pinpointing” to a previously selected area, and the court agreed with REAL. Instead, the court ruled that the proper claim construction is the approximate geographic location of a property located in the database. The court sent the case back to the trial court for further proceedings based on the revised claim construction.
Move, Inc. v. Real Estate Alliance Ltd., 413 Fed. Appx. 280 (Fed. Cir. 2011).