Court of Appeals upholds District Court’s order on Hulu’s non-infringement in Sound View allegations

Court of Appeals upholds District Court’s order on Hulu’s non-infringement in Sound View allegations

Cites the Mformation Techs., Inc. v. Rsch. In Motion Ltd., 764 F.3d 1392, 1398, case, to explain the matter

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) has endorsed the decision of the US District Court for the Central District of California that Sound View Innovations’ multimedia streaming patent claims were not infringed.

Ruling on the matter, Judge Raymond T Chen said that this was because Hulu’s “accused products do not perform the claim limitations in the required sequence.”

The case was presented before the CAFC in 2022, and the US District Court for the Central District of California had affirmed in part and vacated in part.

It remanded the matter to the district court for further proceedings after the Court of Appeals ruled that the term ‘buffer’ in Claim 16 of Sound View’s US Patent No. 6,708,213 could not cover ‘a cache’, and vacated the district court’s grant of summary judgment of Hulu’s non-infringement.

Judge Chen explained, “It appears that ‘buffer’ should be given the ordinary meaning proposed by Sound View here, and in the district court, based on a dictionary definition: ‘temporary storage for data being sent or received.’”

The district court construed ‘buffer’ to mean “short-term storage, associated with the Streaming Media object,” and again granted summary judgment of non-infringement for Hulu.

However, on another appeal before the CAFC, the bench observed that the district court “erred in its construction of the claimed term ‘buffer’. But it had correctly construed claim 16 to require a specific order of operation.”

The CAFC judge affirmed the decision, as the second ground independently supported the summary judgment grant.

On the first ground on which the district court granted summary judgment, the Court of Appeals rejected the district court’s reasoning.

It stated, “Several embodiments and the prosecution history disclose allocating a buffer associated with the same SM object. This association transforms the claimed buffer into a specialized buffer dedicated to a single SM object.”

It added that since Hulu’s accused products were ‘general purpose’, the district court found that it could not be the specialized buffers required by the claim.

However, the CAFC maintained that the evidence did not support that reasoning and “nothing in the claim language describes the buffer as a specialized buffer that must be associated with only one SM object.”

However, on the second ground, the Court of Appeals sided with the district court, stating, “Claim 16 requires a specific sequence for the first two recited steps: first ‘receiving a request for an SM object from one of the said plurality of clients at one of the said plurality of helper servers, and then allocating a buffer at one of the said plurality of HSs to cache at least a portion of the requested SM object.”

While neither party disputed that Hulu’s products did not perform the claim limitations in the order required under the district court, they disagreed on whether Claim 16 required an order of steps.

The CAFC held, “Both the grammar and the logic of claim 16 require the first limitation to be performed before the second.”

It added, “A claim requires an ordering of steps when the claim language (as a matter of logic or grammar) requires that the steps be performed in the order written, or the specification directly or implicitly requires’ an order of steps.”

Citing the Mformation Techs., Inc. v. Rsch. In Motion Ltd., 764 F.3d 1392, 1398 (Fed. Cir. 2014), the CAFC pointed to the claim language: “Grammatically, ‘a request for an SM object’ in the first limitation provides an antecedent basis for ‘said requested SM object’ in the second.

It furthered, “The past participle ’requested’ acts as an adjective modifying the noun ‘SM object,’ describing a logical relationship: for ‘requested SM object’ to make sense. A request must occur before the object can be described as ‘requested.’ Only after a request is received, the SM object acquires the status of being ‘requested.’”

This meant, “The ‘requested’ is not only a grammatical descriptor, but is also a status indicator reflecting a completed action - the receiving of a request. Because the second limitation expressly references ‘said requested SM object’, it necessarily depends on the first limitation having been performed.”

Thus, the Court of Appeals overruled the submission of Sound View that the claim did not recite an order and could be performed in any order. It noted that its caselaw said, “implicit ordering exists when there are inherent logical dependencies or functional relationships between the recited steps of a method claim.”