Texas Digital for a short time held out hope that a simple dictionary definition of a complex term in a patent case could avoid the need for experts and quickly clarify many claim construction issues. This was to be accomplished by raising the status of a dictionary to a primary source of information for the judicial construction of patent terms. What appeared to be such a neat, clean solution created a quagmire of controversy culminating in numerous amici briefs attacking Texas Digital and leading to the en banc reclassification in Phillips of dictionaries into the disfavored category of extrinsic evidence that should never trump the ordinary meaning of a term based upon the intrinsic evidence comprising the specification and prosecution history.
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