United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ______________________

SOUND VIEW INNOVATIONS, LLC, Plaintiff-Appellant

v.

HULU, LLC, Defendant-Appellee ______________________

2021-1998 ______________________

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Central District of California in No. 2:17-cv-04146-JAK- PLA, Judge John A. Kronstadt. ______________________

Decided: May 11, 2022 ______________________

ALAN KELLMAN, Desmarais LLP, New York, NY, ar- gued for plaintiff-appellant. Also represented by FREDERICK DING; PETER CURTIS MAGIC, San Francisco, CA.

BRETT JOHNSTON WILLIAMSON, O'Melveny & Myers LLP, Newport Beach, CA, argued for defendant-appellee. Also represented by BRADLEY M. BERG, JOHN C. KAPPOS, BO MOON, CAMERON WILLIAM WESTIN; PATRICK NACK- LEHMAN, Menlo Park, CA. ______________________

Before PROST, MAYER, and TARANTO, Circuit Judges. Case: 21-1998 Document: 45 Page: 2 Filed: 05/11/2022

2 SOUND VIEW INNOVATIONS, LLC v. HULU, LLC

TARANTO, Circuit Judge. Sound View Innovations, LLC owns now-expired U.S. Patent No. 6,708,213, titled “Method for Streaming Multi- media Information over Public Networks.” When Sound View brought the present case against Hulu, LLC, it al- leged infringement of six Sound View patents, but only claim 16 of the ’213 patent remains at issue. Sound View alleges that Hulu infringed claim 16 by its use of (third party) edge servers, which sit between a central Hulu con- tent server and the video-playing devices of end-user cus- tomers (clients). Most significantly for purposes of the infringement dispute currently before us, Sound View al- leges that, under Hulu’s direction, when an edge server re- ceives a client request for a video not already fully in the edge server’s possession, and obtains segments of the video seriatim from the content server (or another edge server), the edge server transmits to the Hulu client a segment it has obtained while concurrently retrieving a remaining segment. Claim 16 specifies a method, involving a content server and intermediate servers (helper servers), to use when a client requests a streaming multimedia (SM) object. One limitation requires “allocating a buffer” at a helper server “to cache” at least a portion of the SM object. The next lim- itation (the “downloading/retrieving limitation”) requires sending that portion to a requesting client while concur- rently retrieving a remaining portion of the SM object from the content server or another helper server. In the first ruling before us, the district court construed the download- ing/retrieving limitation not to cover a process in which the downloading occurs from one buffer in the helper server and the (concurrent) retrieving places what is retrieved in another buffer in that server. Rather, the court construed the limitation to require that the same buffer in the helper server—the one allocated in the preceding step—host both the portion sent to the client and a remaining portion re- trieved concurrently from the content server or other Case: 21-1998 Document: 45 Page: 3 Filed: 05/11/2022

SOUND VIEW INNOVATIONS, LLC v. HULU, LLC 3

helper server. Sound View Innovations, LLC v. Hulu, LLC, No. LA CV17-04146, 2020 WL 10758103, at *5 (C.D. Cal. Apr. 13, 2020) (Claim Construction Opinion). With that claim construction in hand, Hulu sought summary judgment of non-infringement of claim 16, argu- ing that it was undisputed that, in the edge servers of its content delivery networks, no single buffer hosts both the video portion downloaded to the client and the retrieved additional portion. Sound View argue