The Federal Circuit has upheld the invalidation of four streaming media patents asserted against Comcast and Verizon under Alice (2016-2531, 2016-2532). In a decision issued on November 1, the appeals court affirmed an August 2016 order by District Judge Richard G. Andrews holding that the patents are impermissibly directed to variations on the abstract idea of “monitoring the delivery of information”. By so ruling, the Federal Circuit rejected various arguments by plaintiff Two-Way Media Ltd that the patents should have survived the second step of Alice because they are limited to certain network or system architectures, accepting Judge Andrews’s conclusion that the claim limitations at issue involve nothing more than generic computer components.

Undeterred by pending motions to dismiss on Alice grounds in two related cases, Two-Way Media Ltd has added a case against DISH and Echostar (Sling Media) (1:16-cv-00388) to the media streaming campaign that it began over a decade ago. The new complaint asserts five patents (5,778,187; 5,983,005; 6,434,622; 7,266,686; 9,124,607) from a family of nine generally related to managing and delivering real-time streaming media to a user device. The case joins two active Delaware cases—one each asserting the ‘187, ‘005, ‘622, and ‘686 patents, as well as the 8,539,237 patent, against Comcast (NBC) (1:14-cv-01006) and Verizon (1:14-cv-01212). The earliest patent in the family (the ‘187 patent) issued in July 1998, while the ‘607 patent issued in September 2015, after the complaints against Comcast and Verizon had already been twice amended. Two-Way Media accuses the defendants of infringement through provision of streaming content services.

Two-Way Media Ltd sued Verizon (1:14-cv-01212) as part of its expanded litigation campaign. Two-Way filed several suits prior to 2010 against companies, against Akamai, AOL, AT&T, Limelight, Southwestern Bell Telephone, and SBC Internet and recently began filing new cases; this suit is its second since 2010. The suit asserts three patents related to managing and providing real-time streaming media to a user device (6,434,622, 7,266,686, 8,539,237). Two of the patents were used in Two-Way’s litigation pre-2010, while the ‘237 patent was first asserted in August 2014 in a suit against Comcast and NBC. Verizon’s live-streaming content services, including FiOS, are accused of infringing the asserted patents. Two-Way, previously known as Netcast Communications, is a former operating company that provided live-streaming media over the Internet. Netcast changed its name to Two-Way in 2004, the same year the entity filed its first assertion suit.