ClearPlay, Inc. v. DISH Network L.L.C.

ClearPlay, Inc. v. DISH Network L.L.C. The Federal Circuit affirmed JMOL of noninfringement on all asserted claims, holding that no reasonable jury could find that DISH's AutoHop feature directly disabled individual navigation objects as required by the '970 Patent, or that AutoHop's announcement files contained per-object filtering actions and configuration identifiers as required by the '799 Patent. The court also rejected ClearPlay's doctrine-of-equivalents fallback for lack of particularized testimony linking AutoHop's structure to the claimed single-object approach. Confirms that a district court may clarify—without improperly changing—a jury instruction's claim construction when granting JMOL, and underscores that doctrine-of-equivalents arguments require element-by-element particularized testimony, not merely an expert's opinion that the literal claim requirement would be inefficient to implement. Affirmed Claim construction / JMOL standard: The court found no impermissible deviation between the jury instructions and the JMOL order; the district court's restatements of the 'disabling' and 'object store' limitations were clarifications of constructions already given to the jury, not new constructions. '970 Patent – direct disablement: AutoHop checks global categorical conditions (feature enabled; device in play mode) rather than directly enabling or disabling individual navigation objects/segment bookmarks, so the 'directly disable a navigation object' limitation was not met as a matter of law. '799 Patent – single-object requirement: ClearPlay's own expert conceded that a single configuration identifier and filtering action resided in the announcement file and were shared across all segment bookmark pairs rather than contained within each individual navigation object, defeating the 'contained within' limitation. Doctrine of equivalents rejected: ClearPlay's DOE theory failed because (a) the record lacked particularized testimony and linking argument on insubstantiality of differences, and (b) accepting the theory would vitiate the patent's meaningful structural distinction between a single-object approach and a shared-element approach. Nonprecedential: The opinion should not be cited as binding authority, though its application of the JMOL/claim-construction clarification framework and DOE evidentiary requirements tracks established Federal Circuit precedent. claim construction infringement non-precedential claim construction infringement non-precedential claim construction infringement non-precedential