269-1. Federal Circuit Confirms Amazon’s Customers are Protected from Lawsuit via the Kessler Doctrine, Despite the Previous Case being Voluntarily Dismissed with Prejudice
The Federal Circuit recently affirmed a district court dismissal of eight infringement lawsuits against Amazon customers. The district court found, and the Federal Circuit agreed, that PersonalWeb’s previous lawsuit against Amazon, which PersonalWeb dismissed with prejudice, barred the new suits against Amazon’s customers. The Federal Circuit also clarifies that the Kessler doctrine prevents lawsuits after final judgement on “any products as to which the manufacturer established a right not to be sued for infringement.” See In re PersonalWeb Techs. LLC, No. 2019-1918, 2020 U.S. App. LEXIS 18939 (Fed. Cir. June 17, 2020) (Before Wallach, Bryson, and Taranto, Circuit Judges) (Opinion for the Court, Bryson, Circuit Judge).
The case began in 2011, when PersonalWeb Technologies LLC (“PersonalWeb”) sued Amazon.com, Inc., and Amazon Web Services, Inc., (collectively “Amazon”) in the Eastern District of Texas, alleging infringement of claims found in five patents, referred to in the opinion as “the True Name patents.” These patents, which all share similar specifications, relate to means for speeding up network traffic by providing a “substantially unique” identifier for items in a system. The identifier depends only on the content of the data itself and can be created by a hash function. This identifier can be used to retrieve the data. Similar steps can be performed on large files by partitioning the file and then creating an identifier for each part.
Amazon sells a product called Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to customers that host websites. The S3 system allows a piece of data (an “object”) to be stored in “buckets” that are then accessible to the web. S3 creates an ETag for each object, such that it can be retrieved when someone wishes to access the data. To use an illustration provided in the opinion, if a website includes the picture of a puppy, the S3 system can save the puppy picture in storage with an ETag. When a user then accesses the website, one copy of the puppy and ETag is saved in the user’s cache. When the user accesses the website again, the S3 system will first check to see if the ETag file is found in the cache: if yes, there is no reason to retransmit the puppy; if no, an HTTP “GET” request can retrieve the puppy picture. This “conditional GET” logic can also be applied to large files that are partitioned, wherein each part gets an ETag. This is known to Amazon as Multipart Upload Application Program Interface.
At the Eastern District of Texas, PersonalWeb argued that the S3 product infringed claims of the True Name patents. After the court issued an order on claim construction, PersonalWeb...
