In a fairly case-specific claim construction analysis, the Federal Circuit reversed the PTAB today in D’Agostino v. Mastercard, Int’l, 2016-1592, -1593 (Fed. Cir. Dec. 12, 2016), finding that the Board erred in determining the challenged claims to be unpatentable because, as a matter of logic, the prior art could not anticipate or render those claims.

The patent at issue involved methods of effecting secure credit-card purchases by minimizing merchant access to credit card numbers. In those methods, a limited-use transaction code is given to the merchant in the place of the credit card number. Of particular importance to the Court’s decision was a “single-merchant” limitation that required that, when such a transaction code is requested, the request limits the number of authorized merchants to one, but does not then identify the merchant because the claims required that such identification occurred only later. Id. at 7.

In its claim construction during the Inter Partes Review trial, the PTAB adopted a construction that did not recognize the separation in time of the communication of the transaction code and the communication of the merchant’s identity. Id. at 5-6. As might be expected, the Court relied upon the specification of the subject patent, as well as its file history, to support this claim construction. See, e.g., id. at 6 (“The prosecution history reinforces the evident meaning of the single-merchant limitation…”).

In general, this decision represents another decision that patent owners can point to in support of the notion that the Board is not flawless in all of its decisions. This particular Board panel made errors that, according to the Federal Circuit, were fairly obvious in nature helping to undercut any notion of Board infallibility.