By Dennis Crouch



Limelight Networks v. Akamai Tech. (Supreme Court 2014)

In an 11-page unanimous opinion, the Supreme Court has rejected the Federal Circuit’s expansion of the inducement doctrine – holding instead that inducement must be tied to underlying direct infringement. The Patent Act provides that “[w]hoever actively induces infringement of a patent shall be liable as an infringer.”

[O]ur case law leaves no doubt that inducement liability may arise”if, but only if, [there is] . . . direct infringement.” Aro Mfg. Co. v. Convertible Top Replacement Co., 365 U. S 336, 341 (1961) (emphasis deleted).

One might think that this simple truth is enough to dispose of this appeal. But the Federal Circuit reasoned that a defendant can be liable for inducing infringement under §271(b) even if no one has committed direct infringement within the terms of §271(a) (or any other provision of the patent laws), because direct infringement can exist independently of a violation of these statutory provisions.

The Federal Circuit’s analysis fundamentally misunderstands what it means to infringe a method patent. A method patent claims a number of steps; under this Court’s case law, the patent is not infringed unless all the steps are carried out. This principle follows ineluctably from what a patent is: the conferral of rights in a particular claimed set of elements. “Each element contained in a patent claim is deemed material to defining the scope of the patented invention,” Warner-Jenkinson Co. v. Hilton Davis Chemical Co., 520 U. S. 17, 29 (1997), and a patentee’s rights extend only to the claimed combination of elements, and no further.

The opinion is harsh toward the Federal Circuit, but somewhat poorly written. In particular, the Supreme Court seems to have misunderstood that the Federal Circuit holding actually does require all steps of the method to be carried out in order for a finding for inducement. The Court questions:

What if a defendant pays another to perform just one step of a 12 step process, and no one performs the other steps, but that one step can be viewed as the most important step in the process? In that case the defendant has not encouraged infringement, but no principled reason prevents him from being held liable for inducement under the Federal Circuit’s reasoning, which permits inducement liability when fewer than all of a method’s steps have been performed within the meaning of the patent.

Of course, the Federal Circuit’s decision in this case would not allow infringement in this scenario either.

The Supreme Court recognized and concurred with the policy goal behind the Federal Circuit’s doctrine as serving to help prevent “a would-be infringer” from evading liability “by dividing performance of a method patent’s steps with another whom the defendant neither directs nor controls.” However, the Supreme Court concurred with other commentators that a primary cause of this concern stems from the Federal Circuit’s unduly strict “single actor” rule for determining direct infringement. Muniauction. The Court writes:

Any such anomaly, however, would result from the Federal Circuit’s interpretation of §271(a) in Muniauction. A desire to avoid Muniauction’s natural consequences does not justify fundamentally altering the rules of inducement liability that the text and structure of the Patent Act clearly require—an alteration that would result in its own serious and problematic consequences, namely, creating for §271(b) purposes some free-floating concept of “infringement” both untethered to the statutory text and difficult for the lower courts to apply consistently.

On remand, there is a good chance that the Federal Circuit will reconsider (and expand) the single-actor rule for direct infringement to more fully account for common law traditions of respondeat superior liability.