Facebook survives patent challenge at Federal Circuit

Facebook has survived an appeal against a lower court ruling that it did not infringe a patent belonging to Texas-based Indacon.

In a decision handed down yesterday, June 6, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a 2014 ruling by the US District Court for the Western District of Texas.

San Antonio-based Indacon, a software developer, sued Facebook in 2010 alleging infringement of its US patent number 6,834,276 called “Database system and method for data acquisition and perusal”.

Indacon claimed Facebook infringed the patent by incorporating linking and search features in the Facebook system. It said the software architecture for Facebook’s social network infringed claims 1–4 and 8–11 of the ‘276 patent.

In its ruling, the Texas court construed several claim terms in the patent and following its claim construction, the court found in favour of Facebook.

On appeal, Indacon disputed the district court’s construction of four claim terms: “alias”, “custom link”, “custom linking relationship” and “link term”.

The district court said the term “alias” was limited to textual expression and that “custom link”, “custom linking relationship” and “link term” were limited to allowing each instance of a link term to be identified and displayed as a link.

In a 3-0 decision the Federal Circuit upheld the district court’s ruling on each term.

“We find no error in the district court’s constructions of ‘alias’, ‘custom link’, ‘custom linking relationship’ and ‘link term’,” the court said.

“As such, we affirm the judgment of noninfringement.”