Opinions — Thursday, January 29, 2026

The Federal Circuit affirmed the Central District of California's grant of summary judgment of noninfringement in favor of Hulu, LLC in this patent dispute brought by Sound View Innovations, LLC over U.S. Patent No. 6,708,213, which claims methods for streaming multimedia over networks using intermediate helper servers. The district court ruled on remand that claim 16 was not infringed on two independent grounds: that Hulu's accused products did not perform the claim steps in the required sequence, and that the products lacked a specialized buffer dedicated to a single streaming media object. The Federal Circuit reversed the district court's construction of "buffer," holding that the plain and ordinary meaning—"temporary storage for data being sent or received"—governs and that nothing in the intrinsic record clearly disclaimed this ordinary meaning in favor of a specialized buffer associated with only one SM object. Nevertheless, the court affirmed on the alternative ground that claim 16 requires the first step ("receiving a request for an SM object") to be performed before the second step ("allocating a buffer . . . to cache . . . said requested SM object"), and the accused products do not perform these steps in that order.

The decision clarifies the grammatical and logical constraints that can impose implicit ordering requirements on method claims even absent explicit sequencing language like numbered steps or conditional phrases. The court reasoned that the past participle "requested" in the phrase "said requested SM object" functions not merely as a grammatical descriptor but as a status indicator reflecting a completed action—the receiving of a request. Because the second limitation expressly depends on the SM object having acquired the status of being "requested," the court held that the first limitation must necessarily precede the second, applying the principle from E-Pass Technologies, Inc. v. 3Com Corp. that when claim language refers to the completed results of a prior step, the steps must be performed in order. This approach expands the circumstances under which method claims will be read to require step ordering beyond cases where later steps are physically impossible without earlier ones, focusing instead on whether the claim language itself—through grammar and logical dependency—demands a sequence.