The Markman hearing is about claims construction, simplifying and agreeing to common terms and interpretations to later be used at the trial.
For example:
Judge Chooses Simplest Claim Construction in a Markman Hearing Shootout
The judge on the Juxtacomm versus Ascential Et Al case released a preliminary list of patent construction terms and definitions and it looks like the definitions from the plaintiff were preferred to the more specific definitions from the defendant.
Quick History: JuxtaComm dreams of $138 billion in lawsuit against ETL vendors and sue the biggest software vendors in the world for patent infringement. Last week The Small Fish Settle in Juxtacomm versus Ascential Et Al where five of the parties agreed to a preliminary settlement leaving seven parties fighting it out including the big fish of IT in IBM, Microsoft and Business Objects.
The Markman Hearing game here was quite simple – you take a bunch of key phrases out of the data integration patent owned by Juxtacomm and Teilhard technologies, terms like “metadata database” and “script” and you try to agree on a definition for these terms so you can work out which parts of the defendants software suite infringe on the patent. When you can’t agree on definitions you bring in the judge and he reads both sets of opinions and comes up with a set of terms. Generally the Plaintiff provides simple and general definition so they can argue that a wide range of products infringe while the defence tries to pin the terms back with more specific definitions. This week the judge filed his preliminary ruling on these terms:
