RESONATE INC., Plaintiff-Appellant, v. ALTEON WEBSYSTEMS, INC., Defendant-Cross Appellant., 338 F.3d 1360

Summary

The preferred embodiment of the patent was that it allowed the data transmitted from the selected server back to the client to bypass the load balancer. This "bypass" feature eliminated the bottleneck that could have occurred at the load balancer. In the accused devices, all data transmitted from the selected server to the client passed through the load balancer. The district court's read a limitation in the claim that the patentee's process always bypassed the load balancer. Since the accused device did not use the bypass feature, it thus did not infringe. The appellate court determined that by its terms, the limitation failed to specify whether data was required to pass through or bypass the load balancer. Based on the plain language of the disputed limitation, any transmission path from the selected server to the client was within the scope of the claim. The appellate court concluded that the bypass feature, though shown as part of the preferred embodiment and discussed in the ...