Case: 20-1566 Document: 65 Page: 1 Filed: 08/12/2021
NOTE: This disposition is nonprecedential.
United States Court of Appeals
for the Federal Circuit
______________________
IN RE: PERSONALWEB TECHNOLOGIES LLC,
------------------------------------------------
AMAZON.COM, INC., AMAZON WEB SERVICES,
INC.,
Plaintiffs-Appellees
v.
PERSONALWEB TECHNOLOGIES LLC,
Defendant-Appellant
LEVEL 3 COMMUNICATIONS, LLC,
Defendant
------------------------------------------------
PERSONALWEB TECHNOLOGIES LLC,
Plaintiff-Appellant
LEVEL 3 COMMUNICATIONS, LLC,
Plaintiff
v.
TWITCH INTERACTIVE, INC.,
Defendant-Appellee
______________________
2020-1566, 2020-1568, 2020-1569
______________________
Case: 20-1566 Document: 65 Page: 2 Filed: 08/12/2021
2 IN RE: PERSONALWEB TECHNOLOGIES LLC
Appeals from the United States District Court for the
Northern District of California in Nos. 5:18-cv-00767-BLF,
5:18-cv-05619-BLF, 5:18-md-02834-BLF, Judge Beth Lab-
son Freeman.
______________________
Decided: August 12, 2021
______________________
STEPHEN UNDERWOOD, Glaser Weil Fink Howard
Avchen & Shapiro LLP, Los Angeles, CA, argued for Per-
sonalWeb Technologies LLC. Also represented by
LAWRENCE MILTON HADLEY; WESLEY WARREN MONROE,
Stubbs Alderton & Markiles LLP, Sherman Oaks, CA.
J. DAVID HADDEN, Fenwick & West LLP, Mountain
View, CA, argued for Amazon.com, Inc., Amazon Web Ser-
vices, Inc., Twitch Interactive, Inc. Also represented by
THOMAS FOX, RAVI RAGAVENDRA RANGANATH, SAINA S.
SHAMILOV; TODD RICHARD GREGORIAN, San Francisco, CA.
______________________
Before LOURIE, PROST *, and REYNA, Circuit Judges.
LOURIE, Circuit Judge.
PersonalWeb Technologies LLC (“PersonalWeb”) ap-
peals from a decision of the District Court for the Northern
District of California granting summary judgment of non-
infringement in favor of Amazon.com, Inc., Amazon Web
Services, Inc., and Twitch Interactive, Inc. (collectively,
“Amazon”). See In re PersonalWeb Techs., LLC, No. 18-md-
02834, 2020 WL 6821074 (N.D. Cal. Feb. 3, 2020)
*Circuit Judge Sharon Prost vacated the position of
Chief Judge on May 21, 2021.
Case: 20-1566 Document: 65 Page: 3 Filed: 08/12/2021
IN RE: PERSONALWEB TECHNOLOGIES LLC 3
(“Summary Judgment Decision”). For the reasons de-
scribed below, we affirm.
BACKGROUND
This is the second appeal in this case involving a mul-
tidistrict litigation consolidating cases that PersonalWeb
brought against more than eighty Amazon customers. Be-
cause we previously discussed the background of the tech-
nology at issue and the history of the case, see In re
PersonalWeb Techs. LLC, 961 F.3d 1365 (Fed. Cir. 2020),
we provide only the following brief summary.
In January 2018, PersonalWeb filed a series of lawsuits
asserting that Amazon customers infringe five patents that
share a common specification and claim priority from the
same abandoned patent application, which was filed on
April 11, 1995. See id. at 1369. The patents are generally
directed to uses of what the inventors termed “True
Names” for data items. According to the patents, a “True
Name” is a “‘substantially unique’ identifier for each data
item that depend[s] only on the content of the data itself,”
as opposed to “other purportedly less reliable means of
identifying data items, such as user-provided file names.”
Id. (citing U.S. Patent 6,928,442).
In the current appeal, only three claims are at issue:
claim 20 of U.S. Patent 7,802,310 (the “’310 patent”); and
claims 10–11 of U.S. Patent 6,928,442 (the “’442 patent”).
Claim 20 of the ’310 patent recites:
20. A computer-implemented method operable
in a system which includes a plurality of
computers, the method comprising:
controlling distribution of content from a first
computer to at least one other computer, in
response to a request obtained by a first de-
vice in the system from a second device in
the system, the first device comprising
hardware including at least one processor,
Case: 20-1566 Document: 65 Page: 4 Filed: 08/12/2021
4 IN RE: PERSONALWEB TECHNOLOGIES LLC
the request including at least a content-de-
pendent name of a particular data item, the
content-dependent name being based at
least in part on a function of at least some
of the data comprising the particular data
item, wherein the function comprises a
message digest function or a hash function,
and wherein two identical data items will
have the same content-dependent name,
based at least in part on said content-dependent
name of said particular data item, the first
device (A) permitting the content to be pro-
vided to or accessed by the at least one other
computer if it is not determined that the
content is unauthorized or unlicensed,
otherwise, (B) if it is determined that the
content is unauthorized or unlicensed, not
permitting the content to be provided to or
accessed by the at least one other computer.
’310 patent col. 39 ll. 8–31 (emphasis added). Claims 10
and 11 of the ’442 patent recite:
10. A method, in a system in which a plurality
of files are distributed across a plurality of
computers, the method comprising:
obtaining a name for a data file, the name being
based at least in part on a given function of
the data, wherein the data used by the func-
tion comprises the contents of the particu-
lar file;
determining, using at least the name, whether
a copy of the data file is present on at least
one of said computers; and
determining whether a copy of the data file that
is present on a at least one of said comput-
ers is an unauthorized copy or an unli-
censed copy of the data file.
Case: 20-1566 Document: 65 Page: 5 Filed: 08/12/2021
IN RE: PERSONALWEB TECHNOLOGIES LLC 5
11. A method as in claim 10 further comprising:
allowing the file to be provided from one of the
computers having an authorized or li-
censed copy of the file.
’442 patent col. 41 ll. 13–27 (emphases added).
Broadly speaking, PersonalWeb’s infringement allega-
tions targeted Amazon’s S3 web host servers and Amazon’s
CloudFront service. Amazon intervened in the actions
against its customers and filed a declaratory judgment ac-
tion against PersonalWeb. See PersonalWeb, 961 F.3d at
1372. The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation con-
solidated the cases in the United States District Court for
the Northern District of California for pretrial proceedings.
Id. The court decided to first proceed with Amazon’s de-
claratory judgment action and PersonalWeb’s case against
one representative Amazon customer, Twitch Interactive,
Inc. (“Twitch”). 1 Id. The court stayed all other customer
cases on the basis of PersonalWeb’s representation that it
would not be able to proceed in the other customer cases if
it lost its case against Twitch. Id.
Because of a prior lawsuit in 2011 by PersonalWeb al-
leging infringement by Amazon’s S3 web host servers, the
district court granted partial summary judgment in favor
of Amazon based on claim preclusion and the Kessler doc-
trine, which this court later affirmed. Id. at 1373. The lit-
igation continued in the district court with respect to
PersonalWeb’s infringement allegations against Amazon’s
CloudFront servers. Those allegations centered on the
1 Twitch is an Amazon subsidiary. Although the
case against Twitch in the district court appears to have
proceeded in parallel with the case against Amazon, for
purposes of this appeal the noninfringement issues are
identical. Therefore, unless otherwise noted, we refer to
the appellees collectively as “Amazon.”
Case: 20-1566 Document: 65 Page: 6 Filed: 08/12/2021
6 IN RE: PERSONALWEB TECHNOLOGIES LLC
servers’ communication over the Internet using the Hyper-
Text Transfer Protocol (“HTTP”), and specifically the
cache-control functionality in the HTTP 1.1 standard. Per-
sonalWeb alleged that “entity tags” or “ETags” in the head-
ers of HTTP requests and responses are an embodiment of
the patented True Names. According to PersonalWeb, the
CloudFront servers infringe the patent claims by using
ETags to validate whether cached copies of previously
served data items are still usable or whether the data items
have instead become stale and must be served again by the
server.
In August 2019, the district court issued a claim con-
struction order, construing ten disputed claim terms. See
In re PersonalWeb Techs., LLC Patent Litig., N. 18-md-
02834, 2019 WL 3859023 (N.D. Cal. Aug. 16, 2019) (“Claim
Construction Opinion”). Most relevant to this appeal, the
court construed the term “unauthorized or unlicensed” to
mean “not compliant with a valid license.” Id. at *18. Re-
latedly, the court construed the term “authorization” to
mean “a valid license.” Id. The court subsequently denied
PersonalWeb’s motion to clarify the claim construction or-
der. In re PersonalWeb Techs., LLC, No. 18-md-02834,
2019 WL 4837185 (N.D. Cal. Oct. 1, 2019).
Based on the district court’s construction of the terms
“unauthorized or unlicensed” and “authorization,” Person-
alWeb conceded that it could not meet its burden of proving
infringement of any of the patent claims. See In re Person-
alWeb Techs., LLC, No. 18-md-02834, 2019 WL 7212318,
at *1 (N.D. Cal. Oct. 31, 2019). PersonalWeb then moved
for entry of final judgment of noninfringement based on the
court’s claim constructions. Id. In view of a pending sum-
mary judgment motion that Amazon had already filed,
which relied on additional noninfringement grounds be-
yond the court’s claim constructions, the court denied Per-
sonalWeb’s motion. Id. at *2.
Case: 20-1566 Document: 65 Page: 7 Filed: 08/12/2021
IN RE: PERSONALWEB TECHNOLOGIES LLC 7
On February 3, 2020, the district court granted Ama-
zon’s motion for summary judgment. Summary Judgment
Decision, 2020 WL 6821074. The court considered four sep-
arate grounds of noninfringement. First the court granted
Amazon’s motion on the unopposed ground that Amazon’s
CloudFront servers do not infringe the asserted claims un-
der the court’s constructions of “unauthorized or unli-
censed” and “authorization.” Id. at *7. The court also
granted Amazon’s motion for summary judgment of nonin-
fringement because the CloudFront servers do not meet
limitations directed to “permitting” content to be provided
or accessed, determining whether a copy of a data file “is
present,” or “comparing” to a plurality of identifiers. Id. at
*7–14.
PersonalWeb appeals from the district court’s grant of
summary judgment. We have jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C.
§ 1295(a)(1).
DISCUSSION
We review a district court’s grant of summary judg-
ment according to the law of the regional circuit. Kaneka
Corp. v. Xiamen Kingdomway Grp. Co., 790 F.3d 1298,
1303 (Fed. Cir. 2015) (citing Halo Elecs., Inc. v. Pulse El-
ecs., Inc., 769 F.3d 1371, 1377 (Fed. Cir. 2014)). In the
Ninth Circuit, summary judgment is reviewed de novo, and
we thus apply the standard applied by the district court.
Id. (citing Bos. Scientific Corp. v. Johnson & Johnson, 647
F.3d 1353, 1361 (Fed. Cir. 2011)). “[S]ummary judgment is
appropriate when, drawing reasonable inferences in favor
of the non-moving party, there is no genuine issue of mate-
rial fact.” Id. (citing Comite de Jornaleros de Redondo
Beach v. City of Redondo Beach, 657 F.3d 936, 942 (9th Cir.
2011)); see also Fed. R. Civ. P. 56(a).
In this case, PersonalWeb raises four challenges to the
district court’s grant of summary judgment. The parties
agree, however, that an affirmance of the district court’s
construction of the claim term “unauthorized or
Case: 20-1566 Document: 65 Page: 8 Filed: 08/12/2021
8 IN RE: PERSONALWEB TECHNOLOGIES LLC
unlicensed,” would dispose of the appeal in its entirety. See
Oral Argument at 0:34–1:08; 23:48–24:20 ,
http://oralarguments.cafc.uscourts.gov/default.aspx?fl=20-
1566_03012021.mp3. We therefore begin with that issue.
Claim construction is an issue of law that we review de
novo. Nevro Corp. v. Bos. Sci. Corp., 955 F.3d 35, 43 (Fed.
Cir. 2020) (citing Teva Pharms. USA, Inc. v. Sandoz, Inc.,
574 U.S. 318 (2015)). “The words of a claim are generally
given their ordinary and customary meaning as understood
by a person of ordinary skill in the art when read in the
context of the specification and prosecution history.”
Thorner v. Sony Computer Entm’t Am. LLC, 669 F.3d 1362,
1365 (Fed. Cir. 2012). It is well established that a patent’s
written description is “the single best guide to the meaning
of a disputed term.” Phillips v. AWH Corp., 415 F.3d 1303,
1315 (Fed. Cir. 2005) (en banc).
The district court construed “unauthorized or unli-
censed” to mean “not complying with a valid license.” The
court reached that conclusion because, despite the use of
the disjunctive connector “or” in the claim term, “the intrin-
sic record reveals that the patentee used the words ‘author-
ized’ and ‘licensed’ interchangeably” in the patents. Claim
Construction Opinion, 2019 WL 3859023, at *5. The court
concluded that “the specification explicitly equates holding
a ‘valid license’ with ‘authorization.’” Id. (emphases in
original).
PersonalWeb’s primary argument on appeal is the
same as its primary argument before the district court,
namely, that the court’s construction fails to give meaning
all of the words in the claim. According to PersonalWeb,
the court’s construction ignores the disjunctive “or” and
reads the word “unauthorized” out of the claim. Personal-
Web further argues that the words “unauthorized” and
“unlicensed” are used differently in the written description
and the prosecution history, that the patents contain ex-
amples of data items that are “unauthorized” but not
Case: 20-1566 Document: 65 Page: 9 Filed: 08/12/2021
IN RE: PERSONALWEB TECHNOLOGIES LLC 9
necessarily “unlicensed,” and that the term “unlicensed” is
one species of the broader genus “unauthorized.”
Amazon responds that the district court correctly found
that the patents treat “unauthorized or unlicensed” as a
single concept that relates to the purpose of the claimed
invention, which is controlling access to licensed content.
Amazon points to the mechanism described in the patents
for prohibiting unauthorized parties from accessing li-
censed data files, which includes a “license table” that
stores the name of a “licensee,” defined as the “identity of
a user authorized to have access” to a data file. See ’310
patent col. 11 ll. 33–44; col. 31 ll. 3–32. Amazon contends
that, although PersonalWeb has identified some examples
in the written description involving permitted actions in
the patented system, the patents do not use the word “au-
thorized” in relation to any of those examples. Addition-
ally, Amazon argues, none of those examples has anything
to do with whether or not a user is authorized or licensed
to access content.
We agree with Amazon that the district court’s con-
struction is correct. Beginning in the initial sentences of
the abstract, the ’310 patent makes clear that an object of
the patented system is to use content-based identifiers for
the purpose of controlling access to “licensed” content such
that only “authorized” users may access it. ’310 patent at
Abstract (“Access to and delivery of licensed content is
controlled using content names that were determined
based on the content. . . . Access to the data item is au-
thorized based at least in part on the name.” (emphases
added)). The patents’ written description proceeds to de-
scribe the invention, interchangeably using the terms “li-
censed” and “authorized” to refer to the same concept.
For example, in describing a “Track for Licensing Pur-
poses” mechanism, the patents state that “[t]his mecha-
nism ensures that licensed files are not used by
unauthorized parties.” Id. at col. 31 ll. 4–6 (emphases
Case: 20-1566 Document: 65 Page: 10 Filed: 08/12/2021
10 IN RE: PERSONALWEB TECHNOLOGIES LLC
added); see also id. at col. 31 ll. 9–32 (using both terms to
describe license enforcement and validation). Additionally,
when describing the license table that stores information
about files and the users licensed to access them, the pa-
tent first states:
Each record 150 of the license table 136 rec-
ords a relationship between a licensable
data item and the user licensed to have ac-
cess to it.
Id. at col. 11 ll. 33–35 (emphasis added). Immediately
thereafter, the patent provides a “description” for the field
in the license table that contains the “licensee”:
identity of a user authorized to have ac-
cess to this object.
Id. at col. 11 ll. 42–43 (emphasis added). These two sen-
tences describe precisely the same concept, using the
phrase “licensed to have access” the first time and “author-
ized to have access” the second time.
PersonalWeb acknowledges that the two words “unau-
thorized” and “unlicensed” are not mutually exclusive, ar-
guing that “unlicensed” is a subset of the broader term
“unauthorized.” Under PersonalWeb’s argument, however,
the scope of the claim term as written—“unauthorized or
unlicensed”—is exactly the same as the scope would have
been if the claim term instead said “unauthorized.” Be-
cause a major component of PersonalWeb’s challenge is
that the district court read the first two words—“unauthor-
ized or”—out of the claim term, it must be pointed out that
PersonalWeb is essentially urging us to instead read the
last two words—“or unlicensed”—out of the claim term. Of
course, a claim construction should generally attempt to
“give meaning to all the words in [the] claims,” Exxon
Chem. Patents, Inc. v. Lubrizol Corp., 64 F.3d 1553, 1557
(Fed. Cir. 1995), and avoid “reading out” words from the
claim. See Apple Computer, Inc. v. Articulate Sys., Inc., 234
Case: 20-1566 Document: 65 Page: 11 Filed: 08/12/2021
IN RE: PERSONALWEB TECHNOLOGIES LLC 11
F.3d 14, 24–25 (Fed. Cir. 2000). “The preference for giving
meaning to all terms, however, is not an inflexible rule that
supersedes all other principles of claim construction.” Sim-
pleAir, Inc. v. Sony Ericsson Mobile Commc’ns AB, 820
F.3d 419, 429 (Fed. Cir. 2016) (citing Power Mosfet Techs.,
L.L.C. v. Siemens AG, 378 F.3d 1396, 1410 (Fed. Cir.
2005)). Here, as the parties appear to agree that there is
significant overlap between the words “unauthorized” and
“unlicensed” as used in the patents, we agree with the dis-
trict court’s analysis which focused on the patentee’s con-
sistent interchangeable use of the two words
“unauthorized” and “unlicensed” in the intrinsic record.
See Baran v. Medical Device Techs., Inc., 616 F.3d 1309,
1316 (Fed. Cir. 2010) (holding that although the use of dif-
ferent terms usually implies that they have different mean-
ings, “that implication is overcome where . . . the evidence
indicates that the patentee used the two terms inter-
changeably”).
For similar reasons, we do not agree with Personal-
Web’s argument regarding the claim’s use of the disjunc-
tive connector “or.” If, as PersonalWeb argues, the word
“unlicensed” were a species of the genus “unauthorized,”
then the word “or” between those two words in the claim
term would be nonsensical. We thus agree with Amazon
that the disjunctive “or” in the claim is being used to con-
nect two words that are synonyms or equivalents of each
other in the patent. To be sure, neither party cites a case
in which this court has held the word “or” in a patent claim
to be a connector for synonyms. But the Supreme Court
has held in the context of statutory construction that “or”
can be used to connect synonyms, see Hawaiian Airlines,
Inc. v. Norris, 512 U.S. 246, 255 (1994), and we have recog-
nized that “many of the canons of statutory construction
apply equally when interpreting patent claims.” PPC
Broadband, Inc. v. Corning Optical Commc’ns RF, LLC,
815 F.3d 747, 752–53 (Fed. Cir. 2016).
Case: 20-1566 Document: 65 Page: 12 Filed: 08/12/2021
12 IN RE: PERSONALWEB TECHNOLOGIES LLC
We also find, as the district court did, that Personal-
Web lacks support in the intrinsic evidence for its argu-
ment that the patents contemplate other types of
“authorization” that are unrelated to license status. See
Claim Construction Opinion, 2019 WL 3859023, at *6. Am-
azon correctly points out that, although PersonalWeb has
identified individual examples of actions that may or may
not be permitted in the patented system based on settings
associated with data items (e.g., read-only, lock flag), none
of those examples has anything to do with controlling ac-
cess to licensed or authorized content. And contrary to Per-
sonalWeb’s assertion that it “does not matter” that the
“specification does not use the exact word ‘authorization’ to
describe those examples,” see Appellant’s Br. 43, the ab-
sence of the word “authorization” from those examples
matters a great deal because the entire issue in dispute is
the construction of a term that includes the word “unau-
thorized” based on the repeated use of the exact word “au-
thorized” in the context of licensed content. If we were to
infer, as PersonalWeb asks us to do, that the patent implic-
itly sets forth other types of authorization without using
that word, we would simply be rewriting the patent speci-
fication.
Finally, we are not persuaded by PersonalWeb’s argu-
ment about claim differentiation and the prosecution his-
tory. PersonalWeb suggests that because some claims in
the True Name patent family use the term “unauthorized
or unlicensed,” others use the term “unauthorized,” and
others use the term “unlicensed,” we should interpret those
phrases to have different meanings. PersonalWeb points
to an example in the prosecution history in which the pa-
tentee amended a claim from “unauthorized or unlicensed”
to “unauthorized” as evidence that the patentee understood
the two terms to have different scope. See J.A. 3409–10.
But, again, according to the genus/species argument that
PersonalWeb is advancing in this appeal, a claim that re-
cites “unauthorized or unlicensed” would actually have the
Case: 20-1566 Document: 65 Page: 13 Filed: 08/12/2021
IN RE: PERSONALWEB TECHNOLOGIES LLC 13
same scope—i.e., not different scope—as a claim that
merely says “unauthorized.” Moreover, under Personal-
Web’s argument, the identified claim amendment would
have had no substantive effect on the scope of the amended
claim. Thus, PersonalWeb’s selectively applied claim dif-
ferentiation argument is self-defeating, and we will not pri-
oritize unclear portions of the prosecution history over the
clarity with which the terms “authorized” and “licensed”
are used interchangeably in the written description. See
Phillips, 414 F.3d at 1317 (“[B]ecause the prosecution his-
tory represents an ongoing negotiation between the PTO
and the applicant, rather than the final product of that ne-
gotiation, it often lacks the clarity of the specification and
thus is less useful for claim construction purposes.”).
For the foregoing reasons, we conclude that the district
court correctly construed the term “unauthorized or unli-
censed” to mean “not complying with a valid license.” Un-
der that claim construction, PersonalWeb has conceded
that it cannot meet its burden of proving that Amazon in-
fringes any patent claims in the True Name patent family.
Because the claim construction issue is dispositive of the
entire appeal, we need not reach any of the other issues in
this case. Accordingly, we hold that the district court cor-
rectly granted summary judgment in favor of Amazon.
CONCLUSION
We have considered PersonalWeb’s remaining argu-
ments but we find them unpersuasive. The judgment of
the district court is affirmed.
AFFIRMED