Joint Infringement

AKAMAI TECHNOLOGIES, INC. V. LIMELIGHT NETWORKS, INC.

• Cases that had been considered under the joint infringement/divided infringement/single-entity rule will now be decided under the law of induced infringement.
• "[W]e reconsider and overrule the 2007 decision of this court in which we held that in order for a party to be liable for induced infringement, some other single entity must be liable for direct infringement.  BMC Resources, Inc. v. Paymentech, L.P., 498 F.3d 1373 (Fed. Cir. 2007).  To be clear, we hold that all the steps of a claimed method must be performed in order to find induced infringement, but that it is not necessary to prove that all the steps were committed by a single entity."
• "It would be a bizarre result to hold someone liable for inducing another to perform all of the steps of a method claim but to hold harmless one who goes further by actually performing some of the steps himself."
• "Unlike direct infringement, induced infringement is not a strict liability tort; it requires that the accused inducer act with knowledge that the induced acts constitute patent infringement.  See Global-Tech Appliances, Inc. v. SEB S.A., 131 S. Ct. 2060, 2068 (2011)."