Tuesday, May 31, 2011

No Divided Infringement Of System Claims Where Defendant Does Not "Put Into Service" Every Element Of The Patented System

The court denied plaintiff's motion to reconsider the court's earlier ruling that defendant did not infringe under a theory of divided infringement pursuant to Centillion Data Sys., LLC v. Qwest Communications Int'l, Inc., 631 F.3d 1279 (Fed. Cir. 2011). "In Centillion, the Federal Circuit held that 'to 'use' a system for the purposes of infringement, a party must put the invention into service, i.e., control the system as a whole and obtain benefit from it.'. . . The Federal Circuit found that Qwest's customers put the claimed invention into service even though they used their own computers to trigger processing in Qwest's servers. . . . In contrast, Qwest did not put the invention into service. Like [defendant], Quest makes the back end processing elements, but it never 'uses' the entire claimed system because it never puts into service the personal computer data processing means. Similarly, [defendant] makes the back end processing elements, but it never 'uses' the entire claimed system because it never puts into service the display of said source data stream. The user must click on a hyperlink in order to display said stream."

Kenexa BrassRing Inc. v. Taleo Corporation
, 1-07-cv-00521 (DED May 26, 2011, Order) (Robinson, J.)

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