Claim construction in post-grant review

Interesting ruling from the PTAB, instituting inter partes review of US patent 8,112,504, owned by Personal Audio LLC.  Personal Audio is the plaintiff in a patent infringement suit against a number of podcasters, and the request for inter partes review was sought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The interesting bit about this ruling is that there were three claim terms in dispute.  In each instance, the patentee did not offer an alternative claim interpretation to that proposed by the petitioner. Effectively, this amounts to a reliance on the "plain and ordinary meaning" of the terms.  Remember, the Board applies the "broadest reasonable construction" standard in IPR proceedings.  

In this case, the Board decided to apply the petitioner's proposed construction to two of the three disputed terms.  In the third, the Board found a slightly narrower construction in the specification that it liked a bit better.  

So... I guess the take-home message from this is that you'd better propose a claim construction to the Board, 'cause they don't seem to like "plain and ordinary meaning" too much.

Plain 'n' ordinary vanilla