Federal Circuit partly reopens PlayStation patent suit
Sony will have to defend its PlayStation 4 (PS4) console from US patent infringement claims at district court proceedings, following a US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s decision to partly revisit the case.
The US District Court for the Northern District of California had previously shot down the suit from Bot M8, which claimed that Sony’s console infringed five of its gaming patents.
The Federal Circuit both affirmed and reversed the district court’s decision, upholding the ruling to dismiss three of the patents but demanded further proceedings regarding infringement of US patents 7,664,988 and 8,112,670.
Bot M8 asked the Federal Circuit to look again at the lower court’s demand for Bot M8 to file an amended complaint and its decision to dismiss the claims of infringement of patent numbers ’8,078,540, 8,095,990, ’988, and ’670.
The Circuit was unpersuaded by the amended claim argument, finding no “abuse of discretion” in the court’s decision to “direct” Bot M8 to file an amended complaint, nor in its decision to dismiss claims related to the ‘540 and ‘990 patents.
However, it concluded that the court erred in finding Bot M8s infringement claims related to the ‘988 and ‘670 patents insufficient.
Fault inspection allegations
The ’988 and ’670 patents detail a device that executes a “fault inspection program” and “completes the execution of the fault inspection program before the game is started”.
Bot M8 had argued that the district court erred in its dismissal of these patent infringement claims because its first amended complaint (FAC) included evidence demonstrating that the Sony console runs a fault inspection program that concludes prior to a game starting.
Sony contended that the allegations were “conclusory and track the claim language too closely” and said that Bot only alleged in the FAC that the PS4 executed its fault inspection program during the console’s boot, mentioning “nothing about whether it completes execution before a game starts”.
The Federal Circuit said: “The FAC plausibly alleges that the PS4 completes its execution of the fault inspection program before the game is started and supports those assertions with specific factual allegations. Nothing more is required.
“We find that Sony—like the district court—demands too much at this stage of the proceedings.”
Case history
Bot M8 had accused Sony of infringing patent ‘540, ‘990, ‘988 and ‘670 with its Playstation console and its PlayStation Network online service, and also accused certain games on the console of infringing its ‘363 patent.
It originally filed the complaint with the US District Court for the Southern District of New York before Sony moved to transfer the case to California.
Alongside the district court proceedings, Sony also attempted to get the ‘363 patent invalidated at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board but failed to convince the tribunal judges to do so.
Sony managed to convince the California court to dismiss four of the five patents for a failure to state a claim as well as invalidate claim 1 of the remaining patent (US7,338,363). The parties then entered a joint stipulation dismissing the remaining claims, leading the district court to enter a final judgment and dismiss the suit.
This led Bot M8 to appeal the decision at the Federal Circuit.
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