2005),[1] LizardTech sued Earth Resource Mapping (ERM) for patent infringement related to taking discrete wavelet transforms (DWTs) in their ER Mapper program.
The University of California, being the record owner of the patent, was subsequently added as a party on the motion.
On October 6, 1999, LizardTech filed suit against ERM in the Western District of Washington Court alleging infringement of claims 1, 13, 22–25, 27 and 28 of the '835 patent, among other charges.
[5] ERM filed a motion for summary judgement of non-infringement, arguing that a row of pixels is not a tile as defined by the patent.
On December 12, 2000, the district court issued an order which granted ERM's motion, and determined the meaning of the word "tile".
The district court held that ER Mapper failed to meet the limitation, since it never added together overlapping DWT coefficients.
The district court disagreed, saying that within the context, overlapping "can only mean that the DWT coefficient ... obtained from the data in one tile, is added to the DWT coefficient at the same position, obtained from the data in an adjacent tile".
LizardTech then argued that in the district court's construction, if DWT coefficients were generated from adjacent tiles, then they necessarily "overlapped".
The district court rejected the argument, saying that the ER Mapper program calculated DWT coefficients only within the current tile.
The court held that there was no evidence that such a person would consider taking a DWT to fall under the "maintaining updated sums" limitation.