Posts Tagged: "collateral estoppel"

The Federal Circuit held that the district court correctly applied collateral estoppel to the ’774 patent because reexamined claim 33 contains the same memory limitation previously found in claims 1 and 19, and because the ’774 patent reexamination never addressed that limitation or the presence of RAM. Instead, the reexamination focused exclusively on a limitation in claim 33 that is completely unrelated to the sole memory limitation, which made claim 33 identical to claims 1 and 19, which had already been construed, at least insofar as the presence of RAM was concerned. The Federal Circuit did, however, point out that this ruling should not be construed to stand for the proposition that a reexamination prosecution history could not create a new issue that would preclude the application of collateral estoppel.