JVW Enterprises, Inc. v. Interact Accessories, Inc.

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• concluding that limitations from one embodiment cannot limit patent claims absent express intent “for the claims and the embodiments in the specification to be strictly coextensive” (quotation omitted)
• noting that specific embodiments should not be read as coextensive with the claims unless specifically prescribed by the patentee
• holding a court should “not import limitations into claims from examples or embodiments appearing only in a patent’s written description, even when a specification describes very specific embodiments of the invention or even describes only a single embodiment”
• “[A] court may not construe a means-plus-function limitation ‘by adopting a function different from that explicitly recited in the claim.’ ”
• the trial court erred by importing the functions of a working device into the specific claims, rather than reading the claims for their meaning independent of any working embodiment.
• “[C]redibility determinations by the trial judge can virtually never be clear error.”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).