Last week, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a nonprecedential opinion in Mirror Worlds Techs., Inc. v. Facebook, Inc., 2018-21276 (January 23, 2020), reversing a district court grant of summary judgment of non-infringement.
Mirror Worlds sued Facebook, alleging various Facebook systems infringed patents claiming systems and methods involving time-ordered streams of data on a computer system. After claim construction briefing but before fact discovery concluded, the district court granted Facebook’s request to file an early summary judgment motion after Facebook argued it had a simple, case-ending point to make.
The patented technology stores documents in a chronologically-ordered “stream.” A main stream may be filtered into “substreams.” The main stream must include every data unit received or generated by a “computer system.”
Facebook relies on certain “back-end” systems, including its TAO system, to deliver data to services such as News Feed for display on user devices. Facebook argued on summary judgment that Mirror Worlds relied solely on TAO as the claimed “computer system,” but TAO does not store all of its data items in time-ordered sequence as the claims require.
Mirror Worlds responded that Facebook misunderstood its contentions, as it asserted other back-end systems were the claimed “computer system.” Mirror Worlds asserted the other back-end systems did not receive data from TAO. Construing the evidence in a light favorable to Mirror Worlds, the Court found that Facebook’s statements were consistent with Mirror Worlds’ infringement theory, and reversed summary judgment accordingly.
The Federal Circuit declined to affirm on two alternative grounds. Applying Second Circuit law to the first alternative, the Federal Circuit found Facebook’s burden was to show it was “entitled to judgment,” not merely that the non-movant failed to produce evidence to support an essential element. The record showed no discovery request from Facebook for evidence supporting the claim element at issue for the first alternative, and absent such a request Mirror Worlds had no obligation to produce such evidence. Mirror Worlds’ response to summary judgment addressed the arguments presented, and was sufficient to withstand summary judgment. Mirror Worlds lacked a sufficient opportunity to respond to Facebook’s other alternative ground.
The Federal Circuit noted that Facebook “made essentially just one point” in its early summary judgment motion, and because the district court erred in ruling on that issue, summary judgment was reversed.