ClearPlay v. DISH Network
Panel: Lourie, Prost, Burroughs
The Federal Circuit affirmed the district court's grant of JMOL of noninfringement in favor of DISH Network and Echostar Technologies following a jury verdict finding infringement of ClearPlay's patents relating to filtering multimedia content. The '970 patent required "directly disabling" navigation objects to ignore their filtering actions, while the '799 patent required an object store where each navigation object contained its own start position, stop position, filtering action, and configuration identifier. ClearPlay argued the district court applied different claim constructions in granting JMOL than those given to the jury.
The court held that no reasonable jury could find infringement under Tenth Circuit JMOL standards. For the '970 patent, the evidence showed that DISH's AutoHop feature checked categorical conditions (whether AutoHop was enabled and whether the device was in play mode) rather than directly disabling individual navigation objects, placing the disablement function upstream of the objects themselves. For the '799 patent, the record established that AutoHop's segment bookmark pairs inherited a single filtering action and configuration identifier from the announcement file rather than each navigation object containing its own, and the doctrine of equivalents could not bridge this structural distinction between a "single-object" approach and one sharing elements across objects where the patent treated that difference as one "in kind."