Federal Circuit Vacates Attorneys’ Fees in Dish Network Patent Case

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit vacated and remanded a decision by a district court that had awarded attorneys’ fees in a patent case involving Sling TV and its corporate parent Dish Network. IP Update writes about the case on its website.

In Realtime Adaptive Streaming L.L.C. v. Sling TV, L.L.C. Realtime sued Dish and Sling TV over its digital data compression patents, but the district court granted Dish’s motion for summary judgment of invalidity. The court granted Dish’s motion for attorneys’ fees citing six “red flags” as reasons that Realtime should have known its case was flawed.

These red flags included previous court rulings against Realtime in cases involving Google and Netflix which found similar patent claims ineligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101. Realtime pursued the case against Sling and Dish anyway.

Other red flags included a Federal Circuit decision in another case involving different technology; an inter partes review that also invalidated key claims of Realtime’s patent; the US Patent & Trademark Office issuance of a non-final rejection of a key claim; a Dish expert’s declaration that contested the validity of the claims; and a Dish letter declaring that it would seek attorney’s fees if Realtime pursued the case.

On appeal, the Federal Circuit agreed that the rulings against Realtime in the Google and Netflix cases were relevant, but found that the district court abused its discretion by failing to sufficiently explain how the other “red flags” contributed to the exceptional status needed for attorneys’ fees.

The court emphasized that expert disagreements are common in patent cases and do not necessarily indicate a lack of merit. As a result, the case was remanded for further review.