US Court Affirms Decision of Patent Infringement Involving Content Distribution Network

The US Federal Circuit Court of Appeals recently affirmed in part a lower court decision that Cable & Wireless Internet Services, Inc. (C&W) had infringed a patent (the MIT patent) owned by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and exclusively licensed to a third party.   The MIT patent was directed to a global hosting system and methods for decreasing congestion and delay in accessing web pages on the Internet (commonly known in the industry as content distribution networks or CDN, a network of servers delivering content on behalf of an origin site). The licensee of the MIT patent alleged that C&W's Footprint 2.0 CDN system had infringed a number of claims in the MIT patent.   C&W countered that the MIT patent was invalid since its claims were either not novel in view of C&W's earlier patent (the C&W patent) or were obvious having regard to both the C&W patent and Cisco Systems Inc.'s product, "Distributed Director". On appeal, the Federal Court determined that the material difference between the two patents at issue was the location of the load balancing software, i.e. the software for locating the optimum origin servers and alternate servers for the quickest and most efficient delivery and display of the various information.   For the MIT patent, the load balancing software was installed at the DNS servers, whereas for the C&W patent, the load balancing software was located at the content provider or origin servers.   The court found some of the disputed claims to be invalid for having been anticipated by the C&W patent.   However, it left unchanged the jury's verdict of infringement concerning other claims of the MIT patent which were found valid. An interesting feature of the reasons for judgment is an informative overview by the Court of the relevant technology and the terminology that has been created by the IT sector to describe the technology, such as "caching", "mirroring", "redirection", "load balancing" and "server selection". For the full reasons for judgment, see: http://fedcir.gov/opinions/03-1007.doc. Summary by:   Peter Wang