Facebook survives Federal Circuit patent suit
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has affirmed a ruling that two patents asserted against Facebook were not infringed.
In a ruling handed down yesterday, February 25, the federal circuit rejected Rembrandt Social Media’s arguments that two patents, US numbers 6,415,316 and 6,289,362, were infringed.
Facebook’s BigPipe technology was the subject of the dispute. The technology increases the speed at which a page is loaded up on an individual’s browser by breaking it into different sections called pagelets.
Rembrandt sued Facebook at the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in 2013. But a year later, the court returned a ruling of non-infringement and found that the patents were invalid.
Facebook then filed a claim at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), seeking revocation of the patents.
The PTAB, however, rejected the claim and said Facebook failed to show by a “preponderance of evidence” that the patents were invalid.
In its appeal to the federal circuit, Rembrandt pointed to the PTAB’s decision as evidence that the patents were valid, while questioning the court’s non-infringement verdict.
But the three-judge federal circuit panel affirmed the lower court’s ruling of non-infringement and invalidity.
“We cannot conclude that, construing the evidence in the light most favourable to Facebook, the jury could have only ruled in favour of Rembrandt,” wrote Chief Judge Sharon Prost.
