In Oatey Co. v. IPS Corporation, the US District Court for the Northern District of Ohio granted summary judgment of non-infringement in favor of IPS after a Markman hearing construing the disputed patent claims. In the appeal by Oatey, the Federal Circuit vacated the summary judgment ruling indicating that the District Court erred in excluding a certain embodiment of the invention in construing the claims. The Court stated that, unless the patentee has disclaimed a portion of the invention or was estopped from claiming same in the prosecution history, there is no reason to interpret claims in a manner that excludes an embodiment of the invention that is disclosed in the specification. In the case the Court believed that the claims could be reasonably interpreted to include the specific embodiment and IPS offered no evidence to the contrary.