SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS CO., LTD. v. INFOBRIDGE PTE. LTD.
- Jul 12 2019 |
- Category: CAFC Updates
In two inter partes review proceedings requested by Samsung, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board upheld all challenged claims of U.S. Patent 8,917,772 , which is owned by Infobridge and relates encoding and decoding video data for constructing a merge list. The Board upheld the claims because it found that Samsung failed to show that a certain prior art reference was publicly accessible before the ’772 patent’s critical date and thus could not be considered prior art. Samsung appeals the Board’s decisions, insisting that it has standing to do so and arguing, among other things, that the Board applied the wrong legal standard in assessing public accessibility. The ’772 patent is licensed as part of a “pool” of patents, including some owned by Samsung, that have been declared essential to the High Efficiency Video Coding (H.265) standard. Members of the pool, like Samsung, therefore stand to gain if another pool patent is invalidated and removed from the pool,providing the kind of ‘concrete and particularized’ economic injury that satisfies the Article III requirement and conferring standing. With respect to public accessibility of websites, the CAFC notes that while indexing is not required to show that a work is publicly accessible, some evidence that a person of ordinary skill could have reasonably found the website and then found the reference on that website is critical. A work is not publicly accessible if the only people who know how to find it are the ones who created it. The standard for public accessibility is whether a person of ordinary skill in the art could, after exercising reasonable diligence, access a reference. Thus, a petitioner need not establish that specific persons actually accessed or received a work to show that the work was publicly accessible. Ultimately, the Board applied an erroneous legal standard in concluding that the listserv email did not make the WD4 reference publicly accessible. The CAFC therefore vacates the Board’s findings on this point and remands for further proceedings.