The High Court (Arnold J) had summarily dismissed a claim for patent infringement brought by Virgin. Basically, the judge had decided that a claim in a patent which referred to "a passenger seating system for an aircraft" was limited to a plurality of seat units (a ship-set) assembled and arranged on an aircraft. The airline who had been sued for patent infringement, Delta, never assembled seats into an aircraft in the United Kingdom. Because of the way he had construed the patent claim, Arnold J therefore concluded that Delta did not infringe the patent.
Giving the judgment of the Court of Appeal in Virgin v Delta [2011] EWCA Civ 162, 23rd February 2011, Jacob LJ overturned the High Court decision. In his view the claim was not limited to a ship-set fitted into an aircraft.
"Accordingly I think the construction of system for an aircraft should be approached with a very strong predilection for understanding it as meaning suitable for. Only if one is compelled by the rest of the claim read in the light of the specification as a whole to read it as limited to a system when fitted on an aircraft should it be read as a system on an aircraft."
Accordingly, he allowed the appeal so that the case is to proceed to full trial.
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