shutterstock_1746746024_oasisamuel
13 May 2022PatentsAlex Baldwin

Sound View gets another shot at Hulu patent suit

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has overturned a ruling from a California court that held that video streaming service Hulu did not infringe a patent owned by patent licensing firm Sound View Innovations.

In a precedential opinion posted Wednesday, May 11, the three-judge panel unanimously vacated a lower court order granting summary judgment of non-infringement to Hulu and remanded the case back to California, ruling that issues of claim construction remain.

The majority of the opinion focused on defining the terms of a single claim in one Sound View patent, which was instrumental in allowing Hulu to move the US District Court for the Central District of California to grant summary judgment in the patent infringement case.

It ruled that the district court failed to effectively define several terms in claim 16 of US Patent 6,708,213, titled “Method for Streaming Multimedia Information over Public Networks” was at issue.

As a result, the summary judgment for non-infringement was vacated and the case was remanded.

Server communication

Sound View bought a patent infringement suit against Hulu, claiming that the company’s method of communication between servers in their online video playback infringed on six of its patents.

However, in the proceedings before the Federal Circuit, only claim 16 of the now-expired US patent 6,708,213, titled “Method for Streaming Multimedia Information over Public Networks” was at issue.

The claim itself covers “A method of reducing latency in a network having a content server which hosts streaming media (SM) objects which comprise a plurality of time-ordered segments for distribution over said network through a plurality of helpers (HSs) to a plurality of clients”.

Sound View claimed that Hulu infringed claim 16 through the use of third party “edge servers” which operate between a central Hulu server and the viewers of their streaming service.

Specifically, Sound View alleged that, when a Hulu edge server receives a request for a video not already in its possession, it obtains segments of the video from the contact server and will play the video segment for the user whilst retrieving the remaining video.

The US District Court for the Central District of California judge John Kronstadt originally construed the “downloading/retrieving limitation” to not cover a process in which downloading occurs from one “buffer” in the helper server and the “retrieving” server places what is retrieved in another buffer in that server.

Instead, the lower court construed the limitation to require the same buffer in the helper server host both the portion sent to the viewer and the remaining portion retrieved concurrently from the content server.

With this, Hulu requested a  summary judgment, claiming that it was “undisputed” that its method does not involve a single buffer hosting both the downloaded and retrieved portion.

Sound View disagreed, claiming that there remained dispute about whether “caches” in the edge servers met the limitation of its claims.

However, the court granted Hulu’s summary judgment of non-infringement in October 2020, leading Sound View to appeal.

Circuit’s analysis

The circuit panel noted that the district court failed to properly define the term “buffer” in claim construction, noting that the court only constituted buffer as having to exclude a “cache”.

It also noted that the court did not establish that the term “cache” itself was a widely enough understood term to be considered “identical” in each use case, and therefore failed to properly define the term.

The circuit said: “In the absence of such a uniformity-of-meaning determination, the district court’s conclusion that the ’213 patent distinguishes its buffers and caches is insufficient to support a determination that the accused-component ‘caches’ are outside the ‘buffers’ of the ’213 patent.”

It also noted that in the ‘213 patent itself, the terms “buffer” and “cache” do not appear mutually exclusive and in fact have “at least some overlap”.

Finally, the circuit affirmed that the district court correctly excluded damages testimony from proceedings.

Did you enjoy reading this story?  Sign up to our free daily newsletters and get stories sent like this straight to your inbox

Today’s top stories

The biggest challenge of loneliness is admitting it

Snapchat ‘refuses’ to pay musicians, claims Swiss licensor

Already registered?

Login to your account

To request a FREE 2-week trial subscription, please signup.
NOTE - this can take up to 48hrs to be approved.

Two Weeks Free Trial

For multi-user price options, or to check if your company has an existing subscription that we can add you to for FREE, please email Adrian Tapping at atapping@newtonmedia.co.uk


More on this story

Patents
20 October 2021   Netflix, Disney, Hulu, and others have come under fire from a New Jersey company alleging that their video-on-demand services infringe video streaming patents.
Patents
23 July 2020   Streaming companies Netflix and Hulu have won their bid to prevent patent company Uniloc from adding new language to retain its patent on digital product licences, following a ruling from the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.