Appeals Court: You Can Infringe a Patent Even If You Didn't Do All the Steps 126
reebmmm writes "In a much anticipated patent law case, an en banc panel of the Federal Circuit overturned existing law and came out in favor a new rule for indirect infringement: you can still be liable for infringing even if no single person does all the infringement. This case consolidated two different cases involving internet patents. In McKesson v. Epic, a lower court found that Epic did not infringe a patent about a patient portal because one of the steps was performed by the patient accessing the portal. In Akamai v. Limelight, the lower court found that Limelight did not infringe because its customers, not the company itself, tagged content. This is likely headed for the Supreme Court."
Cory Doctorow FTW! (Score:3, Interesting)
Cory Doctorow's speeches and essays about the coming war on general purpose computing come to mind. Any Turing-complete computer is infringing. Destroy *all* the computers!
Re:Infringe all the patents! (Score:5, Interesting)
Although not entirely pertinent, a cursory reading of the the dissenting opinion by Circuit Judge Newman, a brief excerpt of which is given below, sheds some light on this:
According to the court’s new ruling, it appears that the patentee cannot sue the direct infringers of the patent, when more than one entity participates in the infringement. The only remedial path is by way of “inducement.” We are not told how compensation is measured. The only thing that is clear, is that remedy is subject to new uncertainties. Since the direct infringers cannot be liable for infringement, they do not appear to be subject to the court’s jurisdiction. Perhaps the inducer can be enjoined—but will that affect the direct infringers? Since the inducer is liable when he breaches the “duty” not to induce, is the inducer subject to multiplication of damages? This return to the “duty to exercise due care to determine whether or not he is infringing” of Underwater Devices Inc. v. Morrison–Knudsen Co., Inc., 717 F.2d 1380, 1389 (Fed. Cir. 1983) raises tension with the ruling of the en banc court in In re Seagate Technology LLC, 497 F.3d 1360 (Fed. Cir. 2007) that overruled the standard of Underwater Devices.
Re:Infringe all the patents! (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically, if you work around a patent's claim by ommiting step(s), but the user(s) are able to perform these ommitted steps, then you are liable.
This means that a whole new area of induced infringement opens and I'm sure some companies are taking note how to extract more protection money from this.
The bar is now lowered to a level where a chain of events can make you liable whether intended or not. It monopelizes not only the patented claims but the whole field of operation.
Just wow...