X Body wins another patent lawsuit defense

A United States court of appeal has issued a 14-page decision that affirms a previous court’s ruling that a container scrap loading system manufactured by Jewell Manufacturing and designed and marketed by X Body Equipment (also known as Acculoader), Rocklin, California, is not in violation of an existing patent.

The plaintiff in the original case, Advanced Steel Recovery, Rancho Cucamonga, California, has claimed the Jewell and X Body product is in violation of its patent No. 8,061,950 (the ’950 patent) for a container packing system.

In mid-November, however, a federal circuit court of appeals affirmed an earlier ruling from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California that “X Body does not infringe the asserted claims of the ’950 patent literally or under the doctrine of equivalents.”

Key to the court’s findings was the placement of the X Body system’s packer and piston-and-cylinder unit at a distance deemed not near enough to Advanced Steel’s design to be in violation of its patent.

“Relevant to this appeal, the asserted claims of the ’950 patent require that the first piston-and-cylinder unit (the ‘container packer piston-and-cylinder unit’) be connected to the ‘transfer base proximate end’ and the container packer proximate end,’” writes the circuit court.

However, “In the accused Acculoader device, which Jewell manufactures and X Body sells, the container packer piston-and-cylinder unit is connected to the floor of the container packer approximately 35 percent down its length,” adds Judge Kara Farnandez Stoll, the circuit court ruling’s author.

"We are happy to see this matter put behind us, both for ourselves and our customers," says Greg Bushong, owner and president of X Body Equipment and Acculoader.