Judge Barbara Crabb of the Western District of Wisconsin:

The question in dispute is whether “providing a communications link through equipment of the third party” means providing internet access to the customer. Defendants say it does; plaintiff says the phrase is not so limited (though plaintiff never identified a definitive construction of the phrase).

Plaintiff is correct that the claim itself does not define “communications link” the way defendants propose. And plaintiff is also correct that the lay understanding of “communications link” is much broader than “internet access.” However, courts cannot look at the claims in isolation or at just the lay understanding of them, but must consider the patent as a whole. As the court explained in Phillips v. AWH Corp., 415 F.3d 1303, 1315 (Fed. Cir. 2005) (citations and quotations omitted):

The claims, of course, do not stand alone. Rather, they are part of a fully integrated written instrument, consisting principally of a specification that concludes with the claims. For that reason, claims must be read in view of the specification, of which they are a part. . . . [T]he specification is always highly relevant to the claim construction analysis. Usually, it is dispositive; it is the single best guide to the meaning of a disputed term.

The phrase “communications link” is never used in the specification, which is the same in both asserted patents, but the specification makes it unmistakably clear that the invention requires that the third party provide internet access to the customer. Because the phrase “communications link” is the only part of the claim that could incorporate this requirement, I construe “providing a communications link” to mean “providing customers access to the internet.”

The first two sentences of the abstract support this construction: “An Internet billing method comprises establishing an agreement between an Internet access provider and a customer . . . . The provider creates access to the Internet for the customer.” ‘739 pat., abstract. Thus, the abstract is unambiguous: the third party intermediary is “an Internet access provider” and that provider does in fact connect the customer to the internet. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has recognized on multiple occasions the importance of the abstract in construing the scope of a claim term. Pandrol USA, LP v. Airboss Ry. Products, Inc., 320 F.3d 1354, 1363 (Fed. Cir. 2003); SciMed Life Systems, Inc. v. Advanced Cardiovascular Systems, Inc., 242 F.3d 1337 (Fed. Cir. 2001). Plaintiff advances no argument for disregarding it in this case.

The decision.

The patent may be valid, but the assertion was shoddy. Netcraft, aka Andrew Egendorf, is the inventor, and an attorney that should have known better.