CFC Requires Strict Adherence To FAR’s Data Rights Clause
Client Alert | 1 min read | 01.28.04
In what the court characterized as an issue of first impression, the Court of Federal Claims in Ervin & Associates, Inc. v. U.S. (Jan. 20, 2004), reviewed the scope of the FAR’s “Rights In Data--General” clause (FAR 52.227-14), holding that, among other things, the contractor failed to protect its technical data with the required restrictive legends and thereby granted the government “unlimited rights” in the data. In rejecting numerous defenses raised by the contractor, the court required strict adherence to the procedural and substantive requirements of the clause, finding that the contractor’s efforts to remedy its deficiencies were “both too little and too late” – a finding that highlights the necessity for contractors to follow such requirements or risk losing valuable rights to proprietary data.
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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.
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