SOUND VIEW INNOVATIONS, LLC v. HULU, LLC

Authored by: Jeremy J. Gustrowsky

The Federal Circuit recently affirmed a finding of non-infringement in a patent dispute between Sound View Innovations and Hulu over streaming media technology. The case centered on claim 16 of U.S. Patent No. 6,708,213, which describes methods for reducing network latency when streaming video content through intermediate “helper servers.” Sound View alleged that Hulu’s use of third-party edge servers to cache and deliver streaming content infringed the patent. The district court disagreed, finding that Hulu’s accused products did not perform the claimed method steps in the proper sequence.

The question on appeal was whether claim 16 required its steps to be performed in a particular order. Method claims generally do not require steps to follow a specific sequence unless the claim language—through logic or grammar—demands it. Here, the first step involves “receiving a request for an SM object,” while the second step involves “allocating a buffer…to cache…said requested SM object.” The Federal Circuit found that the word “requested” in the second step was not merely a grammatical placeholder but a status indicator reflecting a completed action. In other words, an SM object cannot be described as “requested” until someone actually requests it. This logical dependency meant the first step had to occur before the second.

Sound View raised several counterarguments, none of which persuaded the court. First, Sound View pointed to other claims in the same patent that used explicit ordering language—such as numbered steps or conditional phrases like “upon receiving”—arguing that claim 16’s lack of such language meant no order was required. The court rejected this, explaining that different claims can establish order through different means; the absence of explicit ordering markers does not override grammatical and logical dependencies already present in the claim language. Second, Sound View argued that under prior case law, an order should only be required when performing the steps out of sequence would be physically impossible. The Federal Circuit clarified that impossibility is not the standard—what matters is whether the claim language logically indicates that a prior step must have been completed.

Finally, Sound View pointed to an embodiment in Figure 7B of the patent specification, which it argued showed a buffer being allocated before any client request was received. The court dismissed this argument, noting that Figure 7B addresses data transfer rate control with an already pre-allocated buffer—it simply assumes the buffer contains data without explaining how that data got there. The figure did not actually depict the sequence of receiving a request and then allocating a buffer, so it provided no support for Sound View’s interpretation.

Interestingly, the Federal Circuit also found that the district court had erred on a separate construction issue. The lower court had interpreted the claimed “buffer” as a specialized storage component dedicated to a single streaming media object, but the Federal Circuit held this was too narrow. The ordinary meaning of “buffer” is simply temporary storage for data, and nothing in the patent clearly required the buffer to be exclusively reserved for one media object. However, this error did not change the outcome because the order-of-steps ruling independently supported the judgment of non-infringement. With the accused products undisputedly failing to perform the method steps in the required sequence, the Federal Circuit affirmed.