Supreme Court weighs in on disgorgement of profits for trademark infringement and appealability of IPR institutions.

Judge Gorton construed nine terms of asserted U.S. Patent 7,825,793. The patent allows for remote monitoring and control of household or building parameters, including security systems, fire alarm systems, heat, air conditioning, and other utilities, by relaying information, via ZigBee signals, from a monitoring device at the location to a remote end user through a node (or multiple nodes) mounted on a utility pole. Many of CIMCON 2019s proposed constructions were rejected as reading out embodiments from the specification, most notably rejecting a proposed 201cmechanism that activates process control equipment 201d construction for the term 201cactuator 201d because the claim requires the actuator to 201cinteract with 201d the parameter at issue in the location, and embodiments in the specification made it clear that 201cinteract with 201d includes monitoring as well as controlling. Judge Gorton refused to construe several terms, finding that the presumption that a term has its plain and ordinary meaning to one of skill in the art had not been overcome. Finally, he refused to determine whether one term was indefinite, both because the argument relied on a construction of a related term that was not adopted and because indefiniteness is inappropriate at the Markman stage and is better left for summary judgment.