[00:00:04] Speaker 02:
We have four argued cases this morning.

[00:00:06] Speaker 02:
The first of these is number 16, 2498, Christie Inc.

[00:00:12] Speaker 02:
versus Black and Decker Inc., Mr. Rowland.

[00:00:19] Speaker 03:
Good morning.

[00:00:20] Speaker 03:
My name is Scott Rowland.

[00:00:22] Speaker 03:
With me here today is my colleague Amy Fogelman, a counsel table.

[00:00:26] Speaker 03:
May it please the court.

[00:00:28] Speaker 03:
I'm sure it's

[00:00:29] Speaker 03:
One thing is clear from the briefs of the parties here, and that is that most of the issues in this case turn on what we contend to be the overbroad constructions of the claims 1 and 10 by the board.

[00:00:41] Speaker 03:
What I would like to do in my brief time before you today is provide to you three examples where those constructions result in impossibilities and also show why those constructions are improper while I do that.

[00:00:55] Speaker 03:
The first two relate to the board's construction of the term canister as simply meaning a container.

[00:01:02] Speaker 03:
Now, a canister is certainly a type of container, and the 640 device discloses a number of enclosures that could have been called containers.

[00:01:11] Speaker 03:
The cover, the central housing where the vacuum unit is, the housing that contains the valves, or that which was identified in the specification as the canister.

[00:01:23] Speaker 03:
Claims, when read in its totality, claim one, doesn't just describe the canister.

[00:01:28] Speaker 03:
I was going to say in the vacuum, but that's a poor choice of words.

[00:01:32] Speaker 03:
It identifies that it's having an inlet valve and there's two or more outlet valves which are clear in the specification are the sources of the ambient air in and they exhaust through the vacuum source back to ambient air, the clean air.

[00:01:47] Speaker 04:
If you're focusing on the construction of the term canister,

[00:01:52] Speaker 04:
Why don't the other claim elements add the necessary features to the invention, but not alter the starting point, if you want to call it that, of what the canister is, just as a term.

[00:02:08] Speaker 04:
It has to have these other features, but that doesn't come from the meaning of the term, but from the other claim elements.

[00:02:15] Speaker 03:
I think it does define the term in this way.

[00:02:18] Speaker 03:
When we look at

[00:02:20] Speaker 03:
The other intrinsic evidence that was before the board, that includes Hayden, which was the principal prior art considered by the examiner.

[00:02:27] Speaker 03:
Hayden describes what I think to be exactly what the canister is here at page 333 of the appendix.

[00:02:36] Speaker 02:
This canister argument relates only to Hayden, right?

[00:02:39] Speaker 02:
Pardon?

[00:02:39] Speaker 02:
The canister argument relates only to Hayden, right?

[00:02:44] Speaker 03:
I'm sorry.

[00:02:45] Speaker 02:
Your argument about the meaning of canister relates only to the Hayden anticipation issue.

[00:02:52] Speaker 03:
Not really.

[00:02:53] Speaker 03:
It also applies to Ivan.

[00:02:54] Speaker 03:
Not on the anticipation basis, but Ivan will illustrate, and I'll get to it in a moment, why this construction is overly broad.

[00:03:05] Speaker 03:
Hayden says at page 333, the conventional dust collector operating through filtration consists of a cabinet, essentially airtight,

[00:03:15] Speaker 03:
and operating through its internal parts at subatmospheric pressure created by a blower at the point where the clean air is discharged from the cabinet to free air.

[00:03:25] Speaker 03:
That's how he describes the conventional dust collector through filtration.

[00:03:29] Speaker 03:
Hayden and 640 are conventional dust collectors, and the essence of any of these devices that would be understood by mechanical engineer practicing in this field is you have to have an airtight container when the air is evacuated.

[00:03:44] Speaker 03:
That's what creates the vacuum.

[00:03:46] Speaker 03:
This canister is the container that is between the ambient air being brought in that's got dust and the blower which creates the vacuum by evacuating that air.

[00:03:55] Speaker 03:
And as Hayden makes clear, that's what's referred to here.

[00:03:58] Speaker 03:
The specification further makes that clear because that's the function of this device.

[00:04:03] Speaker 03:
However, the board didn't adopt that construction.

[00:04:06] Speaker 03:
Instead, it adopted Black and Decker's construction which essentially said a container that has filter and dust in it.

[00:04:13] Speaker 03:
And that's what gave rise to the first of the problems that we had.

[00:04:15] Speaker 02:
What is your definition of container?

[00:04:17] Speaker 02:
Did you ask the board to construe container?

[00:04:21] Speaker 03:
Neither side asked for a construction because, and we didn't ask for a construction because we didn't think it was necessary in this field in which every single vacuum filtration device has a canister to contain the sub-atmospheric air.

[00:04:34] Speaker 03:
It has to exist.

[00:04:36] Speaker 03:
That is what creates the vacuum.

[00:04:38] Speaker 03:
We didn't feel like in this context it needed further definition than it did.

[00:04:42] Speaker 03:
But I would say, if I was going to provide a construction, the construction that Hayden provides as the conventional dust collector is what applies to us, it applies to Hayden, and frankly it applies to Ivan as well.

[00:04:53] Speaker 01:
I'm sorry, I still don't understand.

[00:04:55] Speaker 01:
The word canister, what is your exact, the board found as a container, the specification expressly says canister 10 is a cylindrical container.

[00:05:05] Speaker 01:
What is your

[00:05:08] Speaker 01:
fault with that definition.

[00:05:10] Speaker 01:
What precisely do you think the word canister should be construed as?

[00:05:15] Speaker 03:
The canister is the container which contains the subatmospheric air.

[00:05:20] Speaker 03:
It isn't just any container.

[00:05:22] Speaker 03:
In a vacuum device, it is the container which creates the vacuum by the vacuum source evacuating the air from it.

[00:05:30] Speaker 03:
It's the central part of any vacuum device, and that's why Hayden describes it as it does, which I think is as good a description as there is.

[00:05:38] Speaker 01:
Say it one more time.

[00:05:40] Speaker 01:
What precisely do you think the construction should be?

[00:05:43] Speaker 03:
I don't think I can say it better than Hayden does.

[00:05:46] Speaker 03:
It's the essentially airtight container of the atmospheric pressure that's created by the blower at the outlet and which draws the ambient air in from the inlet.

[00:05:57] Speaker 01:
That's all of the things that a canister in Hayden does functionally.

[00:06:03] Speaker 01:
This is a

[00:06:06] Speaker 01:
structural claim and we're trying to figure out what the use of the word canister means.

[00:06:12] Speaker 01:
I don't understand.

[00:06:13] Speaker 01:
You'd like me to report from Hayden all of the functional, all the functions the canister does into the definition in claim one of a structural element?

[00:06:27] Speaker 03:
Claim one defines the canister as having an inlet port and at least two outlet ports.

[00:06:32] Speaker 03:
That excludes the other containers that are involved in the 640 patent.

[00:06:37] Speaker 01:
It is the container that has the inlet port and the outlet port.

[00:06:49] Speaker 01:
Things don't have two inlet ports, two valves disposed outside, each valve being mnemonic.

[00:06:56] Speaker 01:
Why aren't you focusing on these other claim elements if that's what you think distinguishes this from the anticipatory reference?

[00:07:06] Speaker 03:
Because I think the broadest reasonable construction is that the canister is the container of the subatmospheric air because the points of entry of ambient air and the points of exit are that

[00:07:17] Speaker 03:
inlet valve and those two outlet valves.

[00:07:21] Speaker 03:
And the problem with what the board did in Hayden is twofold.

[00:07:23] Speaker 03:
Number one, it applied an unnecessarily narrow construction by just saying part of the cabinet, as Hayden describes it, or the canister, as it's described in 640, is a canister.

[00:07:37] Speaker 03:
And when coupled with the board's definition of ambient air, it leads to a result that can't be right.

[00:07:43] Speaker 03:
The board described ambient air as being air outside of the canister.

[00:07:47] Speaker 03:
And that's true because the canister is the enclosure in which the vacuum is created.

[00:07:52] Speaker 03:
Air outside is ambient air.

[00:07:55] Speaker 03:
But when you look at Hayden, the board said that just the lower dirty air chamber was a cabinet.

[00:08:00] Speaker 03:
That would mean that the upper clean air chamber, all of which is within the pressure vessel, is ambient air.

[00:08:08] Speaker 03:
But Hayden says specifically his entire cabinet is sub-pressure or is sub-atmospheric air.

[00:08:14] Speaker 03:
And Black & Decker concedes that its upper chamber

[00:08:16] Speaker 03:
is negative pressure air.

[00:08:18] Speaker 03:
Negative pressure air can't be ambient air by definition.

[00:08:21] Speaker 03:
And in fact, the Hayden device would not work if there were ambient air in its upper chamber.

[00:08:27] Speaker 03:
Because it depends upon its valves being located within the negative pressure.

[00:08:32] Speaker 03:
And in fact, the declaration by Black and Decker's expert specifically says that when Hayden goes into back flush mode and needs ambient air, it has to reach outside of its chamber, its canister, to reach ambient air.

[00:08:46] Speaker 03:
So the board's definition doesn't work.

[00:08:48] Speaker 03:
If it uses a narrow definition to say this sub-compartment, then it has to have the absurdity that negative pressure air is the same thing as ambient air and a construction in which the Hayden device won't even work.

[00:09:02] Speaker 03:
It's an example of why that construction can't fit.

[00:09:05] Speaker 03:
It's also perplexing to us.

[00:09:07] Speaker 04:
Does Hayden tell us whether the pressure is the same in the dirty room and the clean room?

[00:09:12] Speaker 03:
It just describes it as all sub-atmospheric air.

[00:09:16] Speaker 03:
It doesn't describe whether one of those relative to the other is higher or lower.

[00:09:20] Speaker 02:
The second... Are you saying that the air in the upper chamber is not ambient air because it's different than atmospheric pressure than outside air?

[00:09:30] Speaker 03:
That's correct.

[00:09:31] Speaker 03:
And it's also under the direct influence of the vacuum.

[00:09:35] Speaker 03:
Hayden says specifically that his entire cabinet contains subatmospheric air.

[00:09:40] Speaker 03:
And Black and Decker concedes that the upper chamber is negative pressure air.

[00:09:44] Speaker 03:
And if you read the specification in Hayden, it has to be negative pressure error for his device to work.

[00:09:52] Speaker 02:
Now, the second instance in which canister is perplexing to us is when we look at... Walter, did you ask the board to construe ambient air as meaning normal atmospheric pressure?

[00:10:04] Speaker 03:
We didn't, because the definition of ambient air, the word ambient,

[00:10:10] Speaker 03:
has a common understanding and it's air that's not been pressured or compressed.

[00:10:14] Speaker 02:
How do we know that's the common understanding?

[00:10:17] Speaker 03:
That would be the understanding of any mechanical engineer.

[00:10:19] Speaker 03:
How do we know that?

[00:10:21] Speaker 03:
We know it from also the context of both of these patents because these devices depend on ambient air to flush.

[00:10:30] Speaker 03:
That air has to be a different pressure than the negative pressure air.

[00:10:34] Speaker 03:
That's what releases the particles in both 640 and in Hayden.

[00:10:37] Speaker 03:
They both say we've got to reach outside of our devices, outside of our canister to get that ambient air.

[00:10:44] Speaker 03:
So the differential between ambient air and the negative pressure air has to exist.

[00:10:49] Speaker 03:
That is what they both function.

[00:10:51] Speaker 03:
Otherwise, neither of them back flush.

[00:10:54] Speaker 03:
Now, when the board took that construction and applied it to IBAN, as you'll recall in 472, IBAN is a bag house that has multiple large chambers in it.

[00:11:05] Speaker 03:
Each chamber has filters and it has dust.

[00:11:08] Speaker 03:
and has a hopper on the bottom.

[00:11:10] Speaker 03:
But rather than consistent with Hayden saying that each of those compartments is a canister, the board said that the whole amalgam, the whole combination, all those compartments plus the hopper equals the canister.

[00:11:22] Speaker 03:
A completely inconsistent construction and application that's based on the fact that it was overly broad.

[00:11:29] Speaker 03:
I would submit that the board got it right in Ivan because all those devices are the negative pressure chamber there.

[00:11:37] Speaker 03:
I see that I'm into my rebuttal time, and I would like to reserve some of that.

[00:11:40] Speaker 03:
If you have no further questions now, I'll yield.

[00:11:42] Speaker 02:
Why don't you reserve your rebuttal?

[00:11:45] Speaker 02:
Mr. Collum?

[00:11:55] Speaker 00:
Thank you.

[00:11:55] Speaker 00:
May it please the court.

[00:11:57] Speaker 00:
I'll start off with addressing the canister limitation

[00:12:02] Speaker 00:
It seems it has some intertwined with what the notion is of ambient air.

[00:12:07] Speaker 00:
And I kind of find that issue to be interesting because we had originally actually proposed to the board below that ambient air was unforced or compressed air from outside the machine.

[00:12:17] Speaker 00:
This definition of ambient air being anything that surrounds the canister actually was their definition.

[00:12:23] Speaker 00:
And the board, if you look at appendix 11, said we were wrong and that ambient air should include air that's inside the machine.

[00:12:32] Speaker 00:
in the air that can be of any particular pressure.

[00:12:34] Speaker 00:
So what the board basically gave was their definition of an extremely broad definition of ambient air.

[00:12:41] Speaker 00:
I think it's a little bit late to go back and say our definition was right.

[00:12:44] Speaker 00:
But with that incredibly broad definition, the negative pressure air that's inside Hayden's clean air chamber that's above the plate certainly could be ambient air because it is part of the air that surrounds that canister.

[00:12:56] Speaker 00:
And I actually think the words in a vacuum all those a little bit of a pun to it is a perfect choice for this case Because that is what the container is it's the part of the vacuum that?

[00:13:08] Speaker 00:
Contains the things that you want to contain which is the filters which is the dust if you read the claim it has Three outlet ports or two or more outlet ports it has an inlet port it has the filters That's why people call these things canister vacuums.

[00:13:22] Speaker 00:
That's where the dust ends up going

[00:13:24] Speaker 00:
And where the word container really came from was at the appendix of 720.

[00:13:29] Speaker 00:
Their counsel said, what can we be certain of when we hear these names in that claim?

[00:13:35] Speaker 00:
We hear canisters, cabinets, and compartments.

[00:13:38] Speaker 00:
Well, essentially, they are all some kind of container.

[00:13:40] Speaker 00:
That's exactly what he said to the board right in his opening statement before there were questions about any of the prior art.

[00:13:46] Speaker 00:
I think that should end the debate there on what a container is.

[00:13:49] Speaker 00:
That's their definition.

[00:13:51] Speaker 00:
And the question of what ambient air is, their definition.

[00:13:54] Speaker 04:
I gather Mr. Rowland's view is that a canister is some kind of container but not any old container and to know what kind you need to look at the context of what this device is supposed to do and I think he says

[00:14:11] Speaker 04:
If you look at Hayden in particular, you can't view the dirty chamber alone as the right kind of container or there would be an operability problem.

[00:14:27] Speaker 00:
I actually would disagree with that.

[00:14:30] Speaker 00:
We had witness testimony that said that canister is the thing that contains.

[00:14:35] Speaker 00:
Now, this is the pragmatic part.

[00:14:36] Speaker 00:
If we're using a vacuum cleaner, what is it that we want to contain?

[00:14:40] Speaker 00:
We want to contain the dirt.

[00:14:41] Speaker 00:
Nobody, if the air goes in or out, we want to contain the dirt and get out the clean air.

[00:14:46] Speaker 00:
And that's what the filters are for.

[00:14:48] Speaker 00:
So while many parts might actually be a container, I guess you could point at sort of any enclosure and say it contains something, the question is, which one is the container that has the inlet port, the filters, and the outlet ports, and the valves outside it?

[00:15:02] Speaker 00:
And that's what the claim requires.

[00:15:04] Speaker 00:
And if you look at Hayden, it has an inlet port.

[00:15:07] Speaker 00:
It has a bunch of filters, number seven, inside it.

[00:15:09] Speaker 00:
It's got the plate nine on top of it.

[00:15:11] Speaker 00:
And those plates have holes in them that the filters connect to.

[00:15:14] Speaker 00:
Those are the outlet ports.

[00:15:16] Speaker 00:
That is the container of the claim.

[00:15:18] Speaker 04:
And the valve sits above nine?

[00:15:21] Speaker 00:
Exactly.

[00:15:21] Speaker 00:
The valves sit on top of the plate, which is outside of the container.

[00:15:25] Speaker 00:
And that's all the claim requires.

[00:15:27] Speaker 00:
The claim does not say the valves actually have to say in ambient air.

[00:15:30] Speaker 00:
That requirement is found nowhere in the claim.

[00:15:33] Speaker 00:
It's not even mentioned in the specification because the specification is silent as to, well, I should go back depending on how one construes ambient air.

[00:15:42] Speaker 00:
It's silent about what the pressure of the air is inside the cover.

[00:15:45] Speaker 00:
In some of these vacuums, the exhaust can go inside the cover so that top part can be pressurized and be at high pressure.

[00:15:53] Speaker 00:
Sometimes they can eject the vacuum, the high pressure, right out of port so that the inside of the cover is not pressurized.

[00:15:59] Speaker 00:
The specification is actually silent on that issue.

[00:16:02] Speaker 00:
But with the board's interpretation of ambient air as being any air at any pressure, which they expressly said in their opinion and got from the petitioner's side or the appellant's side of the case, I think that resolves the question that the negative pressure air that's in the chamber above is perfectly part of the ambient air, even if the words in ambient air appeared in the claim, which they don't.

[00:16:32] Speaker 00:
And again, I think this whole ambient air issue and a lot of these things matter much less to Ivan, because in that situation, the valves are actually on the very outside of the housing.

[00:16:42] Speaker 00:
In regard to Hayden, it's much less of an issue.

[00:16:45] Speaker 00:
But no matter what, Hayden does draw in the ambient air from the outside of the machine anyway.

[00:16:48] Speaker 00:
It just happens to open through a port in the wall.

[00:16:51] Speaker 00:
And I think if we were to call the canister, I think it's unusual to do claim construction about what a canister is while you're reading Hayden.

[00:16:58] Speaker 00:
Because really, I think the proper exercise that should have been done

[00:17:01] Speaker 00:
is to read it in the context of the 640 patent.

[00:17:04] Speaker 00:
And really, the only part in the 640 patent that contains all those parts is the vacuum below.

[00:17:10] Speaker 00:
But if you were to start excluding things that go above that, then you start excluding the cover in that patent.

[00:17:15] Speaker 00:
And we think that would be wrong, because that would read out the disclosed embodiment.

[00:17:19] Speaker 00:
The other term that was in dispute was pneumatic communication.

[00:17:23] Speaker 00:
This is a little bit unusual because throughout the proceedings below, the real dispute was pneumatic communication.

[00:17:29] Speaker 00:
And I think somewhere along the line in this appeal, the issue has come a little bit more about the word connection.

[00:17:36] Speaker 00:
And I think what they're trying to do is impart a structural requirement into the word connection there.

[00:17:41] Speaker 00:
And when we think that's wrong, if you read the patent and look at the claim as a whole, the word connection that they're using is really talking about a valve state.

[00:17:49] Speaker 00:
meaning is it connected to this or is it connected to ambient air?

[00:17:52] Speaker 00:
They're not talking about physical connections when they use that word.

[00:17:55] Speaker 04:
In fact, you can't... Is it your understanding that in order to be operable, there must be some sort of protection between what's inside the path of air communication and what's outside that path?

[00:18:15] Speaker 00:
Some sort of guidance or collection, something that defines a

[00:18:19] Speaker 00:
communication that enables transfer from point A to point B, right?

[00:18:24] Speaker 00:
I'm not sure, I believe that the definition we offered was that communicate means it can transfer from one to the other, pneumatic means it relates to the air.

[00:18:34] Speaker 00:
But certainly when you deal with the air, there has to be some guidance, for example.

[00:18:38] Speaker 00:
It might not necessarily be what you classically call a connection, like a duct or a pipe.

[00:18:44] Speaker 00:
It could be something more large collection, if you were to

[00:18:47] Speaker 00:
open that door there and open that door there, and there's a breeze going through, this room would, in a sense, connect those two doors and guide the airflow through.

[00:18:56] Speaker 00:
You might not call a room a connection, but some sort of collection or guidance, I would agree with that principle.

[00:19:01] Speaker 00:
And that's really what the board said, was that the claim is not limited to any particular connective structure.

[00:19:08] Speaker 00:
They didn't say you can't have anything that would control the airflow.

[00:19:11] Speaker 04:
I was struck, I think, by the board's

[00:19:13] Speaker 04:
use of the word particular as what was not being required, as opposed to not having something that could be called a connection metal.

[00:19:24] Speaker 00:
Sure.

[00:19:25] Speaker 00:
I think that's really, I think their connection, their construction was right in the sense where they're saying it's not limited to how you do it.

[00:19:32] Speaker 00:
So for example, with Hayden, that upper part that encircles the valves, it collects all the air coming out of those valves and directs it up into that vacuum source.

[00:19:42] Speaker 00:
That is a connection.

[00:19:43] Speaker 00:
It seals it from the outside world.

[00:19:46] Speaker 00:
That really, truly is, in that sense, it's a pneumatic communication because it keeps other air from getting sucked up into the vacuum.

[00:19:54] Speaker 04:
Can I change the topic?

[00:19:56] Speaker 04:
Absolutely.

[00:19:58] Speaker 04:
Motivation to combine, to reach over to Von Stapelberg.

[00:20:02] Speaker 04:
Yes.

[00:20:03] Speaker 04:
Where's the evidence and where are the board's findings about the motivation?

[00:20:08] Speaker 00:
Absolutely.

[00:20:08] Speaker 04:
This is for certain dependent claims.

[00:20:11] Speaker 00:
Absolutely.

[00:20:14] Speaker 00:
Let me jump, sorry, to the back of my outline.

[00:20:22] Speaker 00:
And this would be in the Hayden decision, so it would be at the back end of the Hayden decision.

[00:20:34] Speaker 00:
Vaughn-Stackelberg.

[00:20:37] Speaker 00:
So we did have a declaration from Mr. Grant in terms of evidence on this issue.

[00:20:42] Speaker 00:
And the reason to combine, well, first of all, if you look at the structures themselves, they're extremely similar.

[00:20:49] Speaker 00:
It's a baffle with which an airflow strikes.

[00:20:53] Speaker 04:
And in Vaughn's... But perhaps serving somewhat different purposes.

[00:20:57] Speaker 00:
Extremely close purposes.

[00:20:59] Speaker 00:
And what I would say is in Vaughn's Stackelberg, they talk about that baffle.

[00:21:03] Speaker 00:
It creates a circular airflow in the top part of the machine.

[00:21:07] Speaker 00:
And as things come into it, including liquid and particles, those strike the baffle and they get directed downward, where there's a lower cyclonic velocity going below.

[00:21:17] Speaker 00:
So von Stackelberg was talking in a sense about a shop vacu that might take up some water and particles.

[00:21:24] Speaker 00:
If you were cleaning your workshop floor and had a spill, you might have wood chips and water on there.

[00:21:29] Speaker 00:
So it was knocking down particles.

[00:21:32] Speaker 00:
And it showed you a way to keep the particles from going up in that high velocity area.

[00:21:37] Speaker 04:
What specifically did the board find and what evidence did it point to that says somebody would have, I guess, starting with Hayden, would have a motivation to say, I have a problem.

[00:21:51] Speaker 04:
Sure.

[00:21:51] Speaker 04:
Here's a solution I can find in Von Stackelberg.

[00:21:55] Speaker 04:
Let's combine them.

[00:21:56] Speaker 00:
The appendix at 29.

[00:22:00] Speaker 00:
They talk about

[00:22:01] Speaker 00:
The trial record establishes that the duct and baffle arrangement in both the combination and challenge claims would allow particles to settle to the bottom of the canister and minimize entrainment of particles in an upper portion of the canister where air exits through the filters.

[00:22:16] Speaker 00:
So if we step back for a second, remember that the invention of Hayden and the 640 patent is I'm trying to clean the filters, right, because they get clogged.

[00:22:26] Speaker 00:
And part of the rationale of these involved in Stackelberg is, well, if you stop particles from getting on it in the first place, you have to clean it less often.

[00:22:33] Speaker 00:
And that's part of the reason.

[00:22:34] Speaker 00:
But to go on.

[00:22:35] Speaker 00:
In addition, Hayden teaches a dust collector having an inlet on the side and filters within a canister.

[00:22:41] Speaker 00:
Therefore, the petition has provided an adequate rationale for modifying the air inlet in Hayden's canister with the dust and baffle structure.

[00:22:48] Speaker 00:
And we agree that there's an issue about shields, which is not really raised here.

[00:22:53] Speaker 00:
But really, it was an ounce of prevention, pound of cure, that if you can use von Stackelberg to knock down the particles so that they're less likely to get to the filters, you're going to have less clogging of the filters.

[00:23:04] Speaker 00:
And that's also part of the evidence that is cited in here.

[00:23:07] Speaker 00:
That included the grant declaration, which I believe is cited on page 28.

[00:23:12] Speaker 00:
And a lot of the arguments are addressed there in that section.

[00:23:18] Speaker 00:
And the rationale is if you can prevent things from getting to the filter in the first place, you just have to clean it less often.

[00:23:25] Speaker 00:
And that's the argument that was presented below.

[00:23:27] Speaker 00:
And a lot of that is cited in here.

[00:23:28] Speaker 00:
And that's their rationale, which are findings of fact.

[00:23:37] Speaker 00:
Anything further?

[00:23:37] Speaker 00:
If there are no further questions, I'm prepared to hand off.

[00:23:42] Speaker 00:
OK.

[00:23:42] Speaker 00:
Thank you, Mr. Collins.

[00:23:43] Speaker 00:
Thank you very much.

[00:23:43] Speaker 00:
Mr. Roll?

[00:23:49] Speaker 03:
Thank you.

[00:23:49] Speaker 03:
I do want to address the court's questions about pneumatic communication, because that, I think, has been something of a red herring in this appeal and even below.

[00:24:00] Speaker 03:
Pneumatic communication is a requirement of the claims.

[00:24:03] Speaker 03:
But Christie has never contended that pneumatic communication doesn't exist in Hayden or Ibent or in every vacuum cleaning device, because the function requires pneumatic communication from the inlet port into that pressure vessel to the outlet port where the vacuum exists.

[00:24:19] Speaker 03:
The issue here is how does that pneumatic communication exist?

[00:24:25] Speaker 03:
And what the board did was it did not look at the specification and the prosecution history that gave meaning to the words and the claims connected to.

[00:24:35] Speaker 03:
If those were mutually consistent and there was no independent meaning for connected to, there was no reason for the 640 patent to

[00:24:47] Speaker 03:
to after it requires pneumatic communication, to require that the valves and filters are connected to said vacuum, which it does require.

[00:24:56] Speaker 03:
Different words are used for different meanings.

[00:24:58] Speaker 03:
And here, the meaning is crystal clear in the specification.

[00:25:02] Speaker 03:
One of the best examples of that is when one looks at the operation of the valves in the 640 patent, where it says on page 201, one reciprocal port of each of the valves is connected to a vacuum source.

[00:25:15] Speaker 03:
And the other reciprocal part of each valve

[00:25:17] Speaker 03:
is in pneumatic communication with ambient air.

[00:25:21] Speaker 03:
The metaphor that counsel used of opening the doors, I agree that that's pneumatic communication.

[00:25:26] Speaker 03:
And that's what happens with the ambient air in 640 because the valves are disposed in ambient air.

[00:25:31] Speaker 03:
However, if I want pneumatic communication between this room and a room two doors down the hall, there has to be a hallway to connect those two.

[00:25:40] Speaker 03:
And that's what is specified with a duct.

[00:25:43] Speaker 03:
And in the prosecution history,

[00:25:45] Speaker 04:
But I'm not sure that the board, you seem to say that when the board said doesn't have to be a duct, that the board was simultaneously saying there doesn't have to be any kind of structure that provides sufficient enclosures, like your hallway, that enables the air to move from inlet to outlet.

[00:26:12] Speaker 04:
And I'm not sure that the board said

[00:26:14] Speaker 03:
I think the board did exclude any requirement of a physical connection.

[00:26:18] Speaker 03:
And that's what we contend is required, a physical connection.

[00:26:20] Speaker 04:
In this case, it doesn't.

[00:26:22] Speaker 04:
Did it say any physical connection is not required?

[00:26:26] Speaker 03:
I think it excluded that possibility.

[00:26:28] Speaker 03:
I think in this case, a physical connection is specifically required.

[00:26:33] Speaker 03:
And that's our point.

[00:26:34] Speaker 03:
The construction that says that one isn't required, we think, is inaccurate.

[00:26:39] Speaker 03:
Our device was distinguished from prior Art Nelson

[00:26:42] Speaker 03:
Because we said that Nelson doesn't have the claim connection of components and that the vacuum in our device is directly connected by duct work.

[00:26:49] Speaker 03:
That's what the connected to means here.

[00:26:51] Speaker 03:
And most importantly, if there isn't a physical connection in our device, our device cannot function.

[00:26:59] Speaker 03:
Our device, unlike Hayden, has the valves disposed outside of the pressure canister.

[00:27:04] Speaker 03:
The only way that access can be had to a vacuum source is by a physical connection to that.

[00:27:09] Speaker 03:
We're not located in it like Hayden is.

[00:27:12] Speaker 03:
That's at the end of the day what distinguishes these two devices.

[00:27:16] Speaker 03:
Hayden requires that its valve be located in negative pressure.

[00:27:21] Speaker 03:
Ours requires that our valves not be located in negative pressure.

[00:27:26] Speaker 03:
That's clear looking at these two patents.

[00:27:28] Speaker 03:
And so parsing the words canister in an overly broad way, calling negative pressure air ambient air leads to an absurdity in which it won't even function.

[00:27:38] Speaker 03:
And that's at the end of the day where we are.

[00:27:40] Speaker 02:
Thank you, Mr. Rowland.

[00:27:45] Speaker 02:
Thank you.