Sound View Innovations, LLC v. Hulu, LLC, No. 21-1998 (Fed. Cir. 2022)
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Sound View alleged that Hulu infringed claim 16 of its patent, titled “Method for Streaming Multimedia Information over Public Networks” by its use of (third party) edge servers, which sit between a central Hulu content server and the video-playing devices of customers. The district court construed the patent’s “downloading/retrieving limitation” not to cover a process in which downloading occurs from one buffer in a helper server and the (concurrent) retrieving places what is retrieved in another buffer in that server. The court construed the limitation to require that the same buffer in the helper server host both the portion sent to the client and a remaining portion retrieved concurrently from the content server or other helper server. Hulu argued 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 that there remained a factual dispute about whether “caches” in the edge servers met the concurrency limitation as construed.
The district court held that a “cache” could not be the “buffer” that its construction of the downloading/retrieving limitation required. The Federal Circuit vacated the summary judgment of non-infringement, affirming the construction of the downloading/retrieving limitation but rejecting the determination that “buffer” cannot cover “a cache.”
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