Fresh From the Bench: Latest Precedential Patent Case

CASE OF THE WEEK

Sound View Innovations, LLC v. Hulu, LLC, Appeal No. 2024-1092 (Fed. Cir. Jan. 29, 2026)

This week, the Federal Circuit affirmed a district court’s grant of summary judgment of noninfringement for appellee Hulu, finding that Hulu did not infringe method claim 16 of Sound View Innovations’ U.S. Patent No. 6,708,213. The now-expired ‘213 patent – titled “Method for Streaming Multimedia Information over Public Networks” – discloses methods and apparatuses that reduce network latency while increasing the quality of media streamed to the devices of end-user customers.

Sound View brought this case against Hulu on June 2, 2017, alleging infringement of six patents, although only claim 16 of the ‘213 patent was at issue in this appeal. In the underlying case in the Central District of California, Sound View contended that Hulu infringed claim 16 by directing third-party edge servers (“helper servers”) to perform every step of the asserted claim, which recites “[a] method of reducing latency in a network” and a list of steps comprising the method.  This appeal represented the second time the case has been before the Federal Circuit, with the Court having previously found that the district court erred in its construction of the term “buffer” as used in the claims.

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Editors:

Nika Aldrich, IP Litigation Group Leader, Schwabe

Jason A. Wrubleski, Shareholder

Contributors:

Julia Davis