Limelight Networks, Inc. v. Akamai Technologies, Inc. (572 U.S. 915)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided June 2, 2014 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 572 U.S. 915 · 134 S. Ct. 2111
- Decided
- June 2, 2014
- Term
- October Term 2013
- Vote
- 9–0
- Majority author
- Justice Alito
- Issue area
- Economic Activity
- Disposition
- Reversed and remanded
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Liberal
Opinion excerpt
Justice ALITO delivered the opinion of the Court. This case presents the question whether a defendant may be liable for inducing infringement of a patent under 35 U.S.C. § 271(b) when no one has directly infringed the patent under § 271(a) or any other statutory provision. The statutory text and structure and our prior case law require that we answer this question in the negative. We accordingly reverse the Federal Circuit, which reached the opposite conclusion. I A Respondent the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the assignee of U.S. Patent No. 6,108,703 ('703 patent), which claims a method of delivering electronic data using a "content delivery network," or "CDN." Respondent Akamai Technologies, Inc., is the exclusive licensee. Akamai maintains many servers distributed in various locations. Proprietors of Web sites, known as "content providers," contract with Akamai to deliver their Web sites' content to individual Internet users. The '703 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 components to be stored on Akamai's servers is known as "tagging." By " aggregat[ing] the data demands of multiple content providers with differing peak usage patterns and serv[ing]…
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