Joint (or divided)
infringement of a patent occurs when more than one party performs the steps of
a claimed method in the patent. Recently, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
Federal Circuit (CAFC) unanimously ruled in Akamai
v. Limelight that there can be a direct infringement by more than one party
when one party directs or controls other parties’ infringing act. The patent in
dispute is US6108703 in which claimed a method directed to delivering digital
data using a content delivery network (CDN). The method consists of four steps
- distributing, resolving, returning and tagging. Limelight is a CDN operator
and its customers are content providers. Limelight performs three steps,
distributing, resolving and returning, and its customers are contractually required
to do the tagging step. The purpose of the tagging is to facilitate faster
delivery of the data by assigning the specialized servers (tagged servers). In
the service offering agreement, the customers are responsible for the tagging
to implement the CDN service. The Court reasoned that Limelight directs or
controls its customers’ act of tagging in the claimed method step because
customers’ tagging was the condition for receiving Limelight’s CDN service and
Limelight provides a detail method to perform the tagging.
Joint infringement issue can
arise in many IoT business cases because several interconnected IoT devices
from different vendors and different entities for storing and processing the
data obtained by the IoT devices and providing the specific services to end
users can be involved. To the patentee, the joint infringement provides
opportunities to obtain the patents with more border claim and more options in
enforcing and exploiting the patent. To the product/service provider without the
protection of patents, the joint infringement issue requires more elaboration
in designing and implementing the product/service. Following are some examples
of IoT business cases that the potential joint infringement may arise.
·
A healthcare solution vendor provides to healthcare providers
a smart telemedicine solution including personalized web pages for doctors and
their patients to communicate. Various health conditions of a patient are
obtained by wearable sensors. Related smartphone app analyzes the health
condition data and provides a warning signal to the patient if the analysis
indicates a wrong with the patient. Then, the patient initiates the
communication with the doctor to check the health condition.
·
A POS solution company provides to retail shops a smart
payment system including personalized services to the shop customers. The smart
payment system provides discount coupons to the service participating customers’
smartphone if the customers read the coupon providers’ advertisement. The customers
pay the discounted price using a NFC enable smartphone.
·
A smart
home solution provider provides to home
integrators a smart utility management system including utility meters and
sensors to measure temperature and other home environment conditions. The smart
utility management system sends data obtained from the utility meters and
sensors to the remote cloud storages. The gathered data are used in a big data analysis
for some useful statistics. The home owners agree to the data gathering will
receive some discounts for utility usages
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