Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued an opinion in Edgewell Personal Care Brands v. Munchkin, Inc, No. 2020-1203 (March 9, 2021), reversing the grant of summary judgment of noninfringement.
Edgewell, the company behind the Diaper Genie®, sued Munchkin for infringement of two patents covering the disposable refill cassettes, U.S. Patent Nos. 8,899,420 and 6,974,029. Munchkin sells disposable refill cassettes that work with several Diaper Genie® products. The ’420 patent requires a “clearance” in the bottom of the cassette. There was no dispute that Munchkin’s cassettes contained a clearance in the bottom. However, the infringement dispute focused on whether a clearance must exist when the cassette is installed in the diaper pail. The trial court concluded that “that ‘clearance’ required space after cassette installation and construed clearance as ‘the space around [interfering] members that remains (if there is any), not the space where the interfering member or cassette is itself located upon insertion.’” Based on that construction, the trial court granted Munchkin summary judgment of noninfringement because, the court concluded, there was no space between the cassette and the pail after the cassette was installed.
The Federal Circuit reversed. First, looking to the claims, the Court noted that the ’420 patent claims are directed only to the cassette, not the cassette and the diaper pail. “[A]bsent an express limitation to the contrary, the term ‘clearance’ should be construed as covering all uses of the claimed cassette.” Second, examining the specification, the Court located “multiple other embodiments which suggest there would be no space after insertion (i.e., that the clearance space would be filled by a complimentary structure in the pail itself).” Finally, the Court found that one of the purposes of the clearance was to properly orient the cassette in the pail, which was evidence that a clearance was not required after the cassette was properly installed. “In nearly all of the disclosed embodiments, the specification suggests that the cassette clearance mates with a complimentary structure in the pail such that there is ‘engagement.’” The Court held the clearance limitation is satisfied when the cassette itself is constructed with a clearance. “The claim does not require a clearance after insertion; in fact, such a requirement would be at odds with many of the disclosed embodiments and is simply not required by the claims.”