{"id":3272,"date":"2022-05-11T17:11:00","date_gmt":"2022-05-11T22:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/patents.harnessip.com\/?p=3272"},"modified":"2022-05-28T13:02:32","modified_gmt":"2022-05-28T18:02:32","slug":"3272","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/patents.harnessip.com\/?p=3272","title":{"rendered":"An Affirmative Claim Construction is not Always Needed, But it was Here"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In Sound View Innovations, Inc., v. Hulu, LLC<\/a>, [2021-1998] (May 11, 2022), the Federal Circuit, whille agreeing with the district court’s claim construction, the Federal Circuit disagreed with the district court’s application of that construction, so it vacated summary judgment of no infringement of U.S. Patent No. 6,708,213 on a \u201cMethod for Streaming Multimedia Information over Public Networks.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sound View alleged that, under Hulu\u2019s direction, when an edge server receives a client request for a video not already fully in the edge server\u2019s possession, and obtains segments of the video seriatim from the content server (or another edge server), the edge server transmits to the Hulu client a segment it has obtained while concurrently retrieving a remaining segment. The claim at issue specifies a method, involving a content server and intermediate servers (helper servers), to use when a client requests a streaming multimedia (SM) object.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The district court construed the limitation to require that the same buffer in the helper
server\u2014host both the portion sent to the client and a remaining portion retrieved
concurrently from the content server or other helper server. With that claim construction, Hulu sought and obtained summary judgment of non-infringement, arguing that it was undisputed that, in the edge servers of its content delivery networks, no single buffer hosts both the video portion downloaded to the client and the retrieved additional portion. Sound View argued, in response, that there remained a factual dispute about whether \u201ccaches\u201d in
the edge servers met the concurrency limitation as construed. The district court held, however, that a \u201ccache\u201d could not be the \u201cbuffer\u201d that its construction of the downloading\/
retrieving limitation required, and on that basis, it granted summary judgment of non-infringement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Federal Circuit citing theapplicant’s statements in the prosecution history, affirm the district court\u2019s construction of the downloading\/retrieving limitation, but rejected the district court\u2019s determination that \u201cbuffer\u201d cannot cover \u201ca cache,\u201d and therefore vacated the district court\u2019s grant of summary judgment and remanded for further proceedings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Federal Circuit noted that all the district court did in construing “buffer” was to declare that it must exclude a “cache.” It said that the district court did not adopt an affirmative construction of what constitutes a “buffer” in the patent. Although there is no per se rule against negative constructions, which in some cases can be enough to resolve the relevant dispute, the Federal Circuit found the court\u2019s construction was inadequate for the second step of an infringement analysis\u2014comparison to the accused products or methods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Federal Circuit said that the district court did not decide, and the record does not establish, that \u201ccache\u201d is a term of such uniform meaning in the art that its meaning in the patent must be relevantly identical to its meaning when used by those who labeled the pertinent components of the accused edge servers. In the absence of such a uniformity-of-meaning determination, the district court\u2019s conclusion that the patent distinguishes its buffers and caches is insufficient to support a determination that the accused-component \u201ccaches\u201d are outside the \u201cbuffers\u201d of the patent. The Federal Circuit said that what was needed was an affirmative construction of \u201cbuffer\u201d\u2014 which could then be compared to the accused-component \u201ccaches\u201d based on more than a mere name, and the district
court did not supply the needed construction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Federal Circuit noted an additional reason why an affirmative construction was needed: even in the patent the terms \u201cbuffer\u201d and \u201ccache\u201d did not appear to be mutually exclusive,
but instead seem to have at least some overlap in their coverage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Sound View Innovations, Inc., v. Hulu, LLC, [2021-1998] (May 11, 2022), the Federal Circuit, whille agreeing with the district court’s claim construction, the Federal Circuit disagreed with the district court’s application of that construction, so it vacated summary judgment … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-claim-constructino"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/patents.harnessip.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/patents.harnessip.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/patents.harnessip.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patents.harnessip.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patents.harnessip.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3272"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/patents.harnessip.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3275,"href":"https:\/\/patents.harnessip.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3272\/revisions\/3275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/patents.harnessip.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patents.harnessip.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patents.harnessip.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}