Fresh From the Bench: Latest Precedential Patent Case

CASE OF THE WEEK

Finjan LLC v. SonicWall, Inc., Appeal No. 2022-1048 (Fed. Cir. Oct. 13, 2023)

In the Federal Circuit’s only precedential opinion this week, a majority affirmed summary judgment of non-infringement on appellant Finjan’s malware detection patents.  The Court’s opinion signals that patents originally drafted as directed to local computing functions may not be infringed when those same functions are performed in a cloud computing environment.

Finjan’s asserted claims were from patents the Court referred to as its “Downloadable Patents” and its “ARB Patent."  As relevant to the appeal, the claims of the “Downloadable Patents” each required scanning by the claimed software of a “Downloadable,” which the parties had stipulated means: “an executable application program, which is downloaded from a source computer and run on the destination computer.”  The claims of the ARB patent required a series of steps, such as “receiving” a stream of program code, “determining” information about it, and “instantiating” a response; each to be performed by “a computer” or “said computer.”  The district court granted summary judgment of non-infringement on both sets of claims because SonicWall’s accused products scanned only incoming data packets without reassembling them into a file that was “executable” on the computer that received and scanned the information, and because the steps of the ARB Patent claims were performed by different computers in SonicWall’s accused systems.

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Editors:

Nika Aldrich, IP Litigation Group Leader, Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt, P.C.

Jason A. Wrubleski, Shareholder