Circumstantial Evidence of Direct Infringement Sufficient to Support Indirect Infringement Claim

The court denied plaintiff's renewed motion for judgment as a matter of law of noninfringement of defendant's network patent where defendant had no direct evidence of customer use of the infringing features in the U.S. "Even though [defendant] offered no direct evidence of customer use inside the United States, its circumstantial evidence is just barely sufficient to convince the Court not to disturb the jury's verdict. . . . [Plaintiff] is a billion dollar company with extensive sales. . . . [Defendant] has offered evidence of [plaintiff's] high sales volume, an instruction manual describing how to activate SDR-A, and several blog entries on [plaintiff's] U.S. support forum from people who used [plaintiff's] devices with SDR-A enabled. Taken together, this circumstantial evidence is sufficient to permit a jury to reasonably conclude 'that, sometime during the relevant period [], more likely than not one person somewhere in the United States had performed the claimed method using the [plaintiff's] products.'"

Riverbed Technology Inc. v. Silver Peak Systems Inc., 1-11-cv-00484 (DED September 12, 2014, Order) (Andrews, J.)