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Consortium Awarded $30 Million for Manufacturing Pilot Program

Client Alert | 1 min read | 08.23.12

On August 16, the Obama administration announced both a $30 million award  that may serve as a model for future partnerships geared towards manufacturing innovation to the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute (NAMII) and a "pilot" program for the Administration's National Network of Manufacturing Innovation plan to invest $1 billion "to catalyze a national network of up to 15 manufacturing innovation institutes around the country." NAMII, which was selected in response to a Broad Agency Announcement solicitation, is a consortium including dozens of major government contractors and manufacturing firms, universities, and non-profit organizations which will "co-invest" $40 million to develop additive manufacturing technology (a process by which products and components are manufactured more efficiently using digital models).

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Client Alert | 2 min read | 11.14.25

Defining Claim Terms by Implication: Lexicography Lessons from Aortic Innovations LLC v. Edwards Lifesciences Corporation

Claim construction is a key stage of most patent litigations, where the court must decide the meaning of any disputed terms in the patent claims.  Generally, claim terms are given their plain and ordinary meaning except under two circumstances: (1) when the patentee acts as its own lexicographer and sets out a definition for the term; and (2) when the patentee disavows the full scope of the term either in the specification or during prosecution.  Thorner v. Sony Comput. Ent. Am. LLC, 669 F.3d 1362, 1365 (Fed. Cir. 2012).  The Federal Circuit’s recent decision in Aortic Innovations LLC v. Edwards Lifesciences Corp. highlights that patentees can act as their own lexicographers through consistent, interchangeable usage of terms across the specification, effectively defining terms by implication....