Today the Supreme Court issued its decision in Limelight v. Akamai, ruling that there is no liability for induced infringement under §271(b) induced infringement “when no one has directly infringed the patent under §271(a) or any other statutory provision,” thus reversing the Federal Circuit’s prior and more permissive standard that simply required that all
Joint Infringement
Patent Alert: Federal Circuit changes law of induced infringement (Akamai and McKesson)
By Essential Patent Blog on
Posted in Patent Alerts
Today, Friday, August 31, 2012, in a combined en banc decision in Akamai Tech. v. MIT and McKesson v. EPIC Sys, Nos. 2009-1372 and 2010-1291, the Federal Circuit (Majority: Rader, Lourie, Bryson, Moore, Reyna and Wallach; Dissent: Newman; Dissent: Linn, Dyk, Prost and O’Malley) substantially changed § 271(b) induced infringement by overruling the BMC Resources rule that a “single entity” must perform all claimed method steps to establish underlying direct infringement required for an induced infringement claim: “To be clear, we hold that all the steps of a claimed method must be performed in order to find induced infringement, but that it is not necessary to prove that all the steps were committed by a single entity.”
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