Akamai Techs., Inc. v. Limelight Networks, Inc.

Akamai Technologies, Inc. v. Limelight Networks, Inc. is a 2015 en banc decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, on remand from a 2015 decision of the US Supreme Court reversing a previous Federal Circuit decision in the case. This is the most recent in a string of decisions in the case that concern the proper legal standard for determining patent infringement liability when multiple actors are involved in carrying out the claimed infringement of a method patent and no single accused infringer has performed all of the steps (so-called divided infringement). In the 2015 remand decision, the Federal Circuit expanded the scope of vicarious liability in such cases, holding that one actor could be held liable for the acts of another actor "when an alleged infringer conditions participation in an activity or receipt of a benefit upon performance of a step or steps of a patented method and establishes the manner or timing of that performance." In addition, the court held that where multiple "actors form a joint enterprise, all can be charged with the acts of the other[s], rendering each liable for the steps performed by the other[s] as if each is a single actor."

The named inventors in U.S. Pat. No. 6,108,703 are Professor Tom Leighton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and his student Danny Lewin (now deceased), a PhD candidate at MIT. They assigned their rights in the patent to MIT, which granted an exclusive license to Akamai Technologies, Inc., a company that the inventors formed in 1998.

The patent claims a method of delivering electronic data using a “content delivery network,” or “CDN.” Proprietors of Internet Web sites, known as “content providers,” contract with Akamai to deliver their Web sites’ content to individual Internet users. The patent provides for the designation of certain components of a content provider’s Web site (often large files, such as video or music files) to be stored on Akamai’s servers and accessed from those servers by Internet users. The process of designating Web site components to be stored on Akamai’s servers is known as “tagging.” By aggregating the data demands of multiple content providers with differing peak usage patterns and serving that content from multiple servers in multiple locations, Akamai is able to increase the speed with which Internet users access the content from Web sites.

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