The District Court for the Northern District of California issued a summary judgment order holding that none of the defendants directly or indirectly infringed E-Pass’s patent. In a previous appeal stemming from this case, E-Pass I, the Court found that the district court had erred in its construction of the term “electronic multi-function card” by requiring specific dimensions in the card, and remanded to the district court for application of a broader construction. In this appeal, the Court found that the district court had not erred in granting summary judgment based on the broader construction. The Court also found that the district court had applied the correct construction of the term when it referred to the plain meaning of the word “card”, and did not improperly depart from the Court’s construction of “card” as articulated in E-Pass I. Although the Court disagreed with the district court’s holding on infringement under the doctrine of equivalents, it did not address other grounds for sustaining the judgment on the doctrine of equivalents because a separate ground for affirmance was available. The Court found that E-Pass had not shown sufficient evidence to prove that the defendants had infringed or induced their customers to infringe the claimed method because it could not prove performance of the steps of the claimed method in the necessary order. |