   Monday, 17 August 2009  Letter from AmeriKat  An i 4 and i
Last week the AmeriKat spent five minutes standing in front of a
Sainsbury's self-check out trying to identify a green oblong
vegetable in her hand. She knew what it was called in her native
tongue, but drew a blank to its identity in England. After a
mild panic began to set in, she began to scroll through the list
of options. The relief was momentous when she set her eyes upon
its Latin alias. The AmeriKat and the English IPKat reader may
call this vegetable 'zucchini' and 'courgette' respectively, but
if you properly construe this vegetable it will always be a
Cucurbita pepo.  Construction was also an issue last week in the
Eastern District of Texas, but instead of vegetables
(unsuprisingly) it was US Patent No 5,787,449 (the "'449
patent") that was being construed before District Judge Davis in
a case brought by i4i Limited against Microsoft. The case
focused on a type of structural information called "metacodes”,
specifically Extensible Markup