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On November 30, 2010, Tokyo district court issued a decision that accused products did not infringe an Echigoseika’s patent.  The patent at issue is directed to a cut, rectangular rice cake piece with cutouts or grooves formed on peripheral side-surfaces.  In particular, claim 1 has a limitation that the rice cake piece has a rectangular contour and is provided with “one or more cutouts or grooves extending peripherally on peripheral side-surfaces, not on bottom surface to be placed on a toasting grid or opposite flat top surface, thereof.”

  The specification says the rice cake piece according to the invention has advantages that (i) when toasted on the toasting grid, the intermediate portions, i.e., cutout portions of the rice cake piece, swell up so that the upper portion of the rice cake above the cutout portions rises upward relative to the lower portion as shown in Fig. 3 below and (ii) because the cutouts are provided at less-visible positions, no unwanted swollen scar-like configurations would positively appear on the toasted rice cake piece.

The accused rice cake piece, on the other hand, has not only two parallel continuously extending cutouts/grooves running on opposite peripheral side-surfaces but also top and bottom crossing cutouts extending longitudinal and transverse directions formed on top and bottom surfaces thereof, respectively.
The patent holder argued that (a) the claim limitation “not on bottom surface to be placed on a grill or flat top surface” simply specifies positions of the rice cake where the cutouts or grooves are formed and it is literally evident that that limitation is used to modify the “peripheral side-surfaces”; (b) claim 1 does not include any restrictive expression such as “without making cutouts on the bottom surface or top surface of the rice cake piece ” or “forming cutouts only on the peripheral side surfaces”; and (c) claim 1 should be construed so that the cutouts/grooves may or may not be provided on bottom surface or top surface .
 
However, the court narrowly construed that limitation using the descriptions of the specification.  Namely, the court placed an importance on the descriptions of the advantages of the invention “no unwanted swollen scar-like configurations would positively appear on the toasted rice cake piece” and concluded that “that limitation not only specifies the positions of the cutouts/grooves but also means that the cutouts/grooves are formed on the peripheral side surfaces, i.e., the cutouts/grooves are not formed on the bottom or top surface” and therefore the accused products do not fall within the scope of the invention.
 
http://www.courts.go.jp/hanrei/pdf/20101203173939.pdf