IP Law Daily, PATENT—Fed. Cir.: Noninfringement of streaming patent affirmed in licensing entity’s lawsuit against Hulu, (Jan 30, 2026)

By Saurabh Kashyap, B.A., LL.B., LL.M.

The district court erred in construing the claim term “buffer,” but correctly found an implicit ordering requirement and properly granted summary judgment of noninfringement.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has affirmed a federal district court’s summary judgment of noninfringement in a patent dispute between Sound View Innovations, LLC, and Hulu, LLC over a streaming method patent. Although the appellate court rejected the district court’s narrow construction of the term “buffer,” it held that the method claim at issue required a specific order of steps, which Hulu’s accused system did not perform. Because this sequencing requirement alone defeated infringement, the Federal Circuit affirmed without reaching other factual issues (Sound View Innovations, LLC v. Hulu, LLC, No. 24-1092 (Fed. Cir. Jan. 29, 2026)).

Background. The plaintiff/appellant, Sound View Innovations, LLC, is a non-practicing entity that monetizes technology patents through licensing and litigation. The defendant-appellee, Hulu, LLC, is a prominent streaming service provider in the United States.

In this lawsuit, Sound View asserted its U.S. Patent No. 6,708,213 (the ’213 patent), titled “Method for Streaming Multimedia Information over Public Networks.” The now-expired patent claims a technique for improving streaming performance through intermediate helper servers (HSs) that cache portions of streaming media objects (SM objects) and adjust transfer rates to reduce latency. At issue was method claim 16, which recites steps including receiving a request for an SM object at a helper server, allocating a buffer, downloading the object to the client while concurrently retrieving the remaining object, and adjusting the data transfer rate.

Sound View sued Hulu in 2017, alleging infringement of multiple patents, but only claim 16 of the ’213 patent remained in dispute. It argued that Hulu directed third-party edge servers to perform each step of the claimed method. The district court granted summary judgment in favor of Hulu after concluding that the accused edge servers lacked the claimed specialized buffer and did not perform the claim steps in the required order. The Federal Circuit in a prior appeal vacated part of that judgment and remanded for further claim construction (Sound View Innovations, LLC v. Hulu, LLC, 33 F.4th 1326 (Fed. Cir. 2022) (“Hulu I”)).

On remand, the district court construed “buffer” as “short-term storage associated with said requested SM object,” and again granted summary judgment, holding both that the claimed buffer must be specialized and that the method steps must be performed in order. Sound View appealed.

Claim construction. The Federal Circuit reversed the district court’s construction of “buffer.” Citing World Class Tech. Corp. v. Ormco Corp., 769 F.3d 1120 (Fed. Cir. 2014), the court emphasized that claim terms are given their ordinary meaning unless redefined or disclaimed. It found that neither the language of claim 16 nor the specification required that the buffer be “associated with” only one SM object. While some embodiments discussed ring buffers or buffer pools, the court noted these were structurally distinct and did not justify narrowing “buffer” beyond its plain meaning—“temporary storage for data being sent or received,” as previously stated in Hulu I. The prosecution history also did not support a narrowing disclaimer.

Implied ordering of method steps. Despite finding errors in claim construction, the court affirmed summary judgment based on the claim’s required sequencing. The panel held that claim 16 implicitly required the first step, “receiving a request for an SM object,” to occur before “allocating a buffer.” The court emphasized the grammatical and logical relationship between the steps, focusing on the phrase “said requested SM object,” which referred to an SM object that had already been requested. It cited Mformation Techs., Inc. v. Research in Motion Ltd., 764 F.3d 1392 (Fed. Cir. 2014), and E-Pass Techs., Inc. v. 3Com Corp., 473 F.3d 1213 (Fed. Cir. 2007), to support the principle that implicit step-ordering exists when subsequent steps logically depend on prior ones.

The court rejected Sound View’s argument that other claims used more explicit sequencing and that the absence of such structures in claim 16 meant steps could be unordered. It found that the logic of claim 16’s structure mandated sequencing regardless of formatting. The panel reiterated that implicit ordering may arise from context even in the absence of explicit markers, citing Altiris, Inc. v. Symantec Corp., 318 F.3d 1363 (Fed. Cir. 2003).

Figure 7B argument. Sound View argued that Figure 7B of the patent depicted an embodiment where a buffer is pre-allocated before a request, contradicting the court’s ordering analysis. The court disagreed, noting that the specification did not describe allocation in response to a request, and that Figure 7B simply assumed data existed in the buffer without specifying when allocation occurred. Thus, the figure could not override the claim’s grammatical dependencies.

Conclusion. Because the accused edge servers allegedly allocated buffers before receiving specific client requests, the court concluded that Hulu’s system did not infringe claim 16 as properly construed. The error in the buffer construction was ultimately immaterial. The Federal Circuit affirmed the district court’s grant of summary judgment of noninfringement.

The case is No. 24-1092.

Judge: Chen, R.

Attorneys: Alan Kellman (Desmarais LLP) for Sound View Innovations, LLC. Bradley M. Berg (O'Melveny & Myers LLP) for Hulu, LLC.

Companies: Sound View Innovations, LLC; Hulu, LLC

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