Clearplay, Inc. v. Dish Network L.l.c., Echostar Technologies LLC

N OTE: This disposition is nonprecedential.
United States Court of Appeals
for the Federal Circuit
______________________
CLEARPLAY, INC.,
Plaintiff-Appellant
v.
DISH NETWORK L.L.C., ECHOSTAR
TECHNOLOGIES LLC,
Defendants-Appellees
______________________
2023-2134
______________________
Appeal from the United States District Court for the
District of Utah in No. 2:14-cv-00191-DN, Senior Judge Da-
vid Nuffer.
______________________
Decided: May 26, 2026
______________________
ALAN G RAYSON L AQUER, Knobbe, Martens, Olson &
Bear, LLP, Irvine, CA, argued for plaintiff-appellant. Also
represented by J EREMIAH HELM , RHETT RAMSEY , J OSEPH R.
RE; D ENNIS BLACKHURST , L OWELL RICHARD WILLIAMS , Wil-
liams Blackhurst Terhune, PLLC, Phoenix, AZ; ABIGAIL
T ERHUNE, Charlotte, NC; MICHAEL K. ERICKSON, Ray
Quinney & Nebeker PC, Salt Lake City, UT; D AVID
J ORDAN, Foley & Lardner LLP, Salt Lake City, UT.
Case: 23-2134 Document: 87 Page: 1 Filed: 05/26/2026

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CLEARPLAY , INC. v. DISH NETWORK L. L. C. 2
ERIC SHUMSKY , Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP,
Washington, DC, argued for defendants-appellees. Also
represented by ROBERT MANHAS ; ALEXANDRA B URSAK,
EDMUND HIRSCHFELD, New York, NY; L AUREN WEBER , Se-
attle, WA; BRENT O. HATCH , Hatch Law Group, Salt Lake
City, UT. DISH Network L.L.C. also represented by ALI
D HANANI, CHARLES S TEPHEN MAULE, Baker Botts LLP,
Houston, TX; L AUREN J. D REYER, J AMIE ROY L YNN, Wash-
ington, DC; G EORGE H OPKINS G UY , III, Palo Alto, CA; K URT
M. P ANKRATZ, Dallas, TX.
______________________
Before L OURIE and P ROST , Circuit Judges, and
BURROUGHS , District Judge.1
BURROUGHS , District Judge.
After a jury found that DISH Network L.L.C. (“DISH”)
and Echostar Technologies LLC infringed patents owned
by ClearPlay, Inc. (“ClearPlay”), and awarded ClearPlay
damages, the United States District Court for the District
of Utah granted Defendants-Appellees’ motion for judg-
ment as a matter of law (“JMOL”). ClearPlay appealed.
For the following reasons, we affirm.
BACKGROUND
ClearPlay’s patents are directed to methods for filter-
ing multimedia content. At issue are claims 28 and 33 of
U.S. Patent No. 7,577,970 (“the ’970 Patent”) and claim 12
of U.S. Patent No. 6,898,799 (“the ’799 Patent”).
Claim 27 of the ’970 Patent describes dividing media
into “navigation objects,” each of which defines “a start po-
sition,” “a stop position,” and “a specific filtering action to
1 Honorable Allison D. Burroughs, District Judge,
United States District Court for the District of Massachu-
setts, sitting by designation.
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CLEARPLAY , INC. v. DISH NETWORK L. L. C. 3
be performed.” J.A. 340, 23:37–40. The method then filters
the media by “disabling . . . one or more of the navigation
objects such that the specific filtering action specified by
the disabled navigation object is ignored” during playback.
J.A. 340, 23:41–43. Claim 28, which depends from claim
27, provides that the “filtering action is skipping the por-
tion of multimedia content,” J.A. 340, 23:59–61, and claim
33, which depends from claim 28, further specifies that
“skipping” comprises “terminating the decoding of the mul-
timedia content at the start position of the particular nav-
igation object; advancing to the stop position of the
particular navigation object; and resuming the decoding of
the multimedia content.” J.A. 340, 24:10–16. In sum, the
method described by the claims involves dividing a pro-
gram into individual chunks called navigation objects, as-
signing a filtering action to each navigation object, and
then playing the media, with navigation objects playing
only if their filtering actions have been disabled.
Claim 12 of the ’799 Patent relies on a similar method,
but provides further that the media content is “trans-
ferr[ed] . . . to an output device . . . excluding each [filtered]
portion,” J.A. 372, 22:13–17, using an “object store [that]
can be loaded into a memory of [a] consumer computer sys-
tem.” J.A. 372, 21:58–59. The object store must include “a
plurality of navigation objects,” and each navigation object
must have a “configuration identifier” that indicates
whether that “particular navigation object applies to the
decoder.” J.A. 372, 21:60, 22:18, 22:20–21.
In March 2014, ClearPlay filed a complaint accusing
DISH’s AutoHop feature of infringing the ’970 and ’799 Pa-
tents, as well as asserting other claims that were resolved
prior to trial. The district court issued a claim-construction
order in August 2019, and thereafter the case proceeded to
trial.
At trial, expert testimony presented by the parties es-
tablished the following. AutoHop’s commercial filtering
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CLEARPLAY , INC. v. DISH NETWORK L. L. C. 4
begins with DISH employees manually noting when a rec-
orded television show goes to commercial and when it re-
turns. Those points in time, called “segment bookmarks,”
identify exactly when the program stops and when it re-
sumes. Then, for each recorded episode, DISH transmits
the segment bookmarks in an “announcement file” over
satellite broadcast. When a viewer watches the recorded
program with AutoHop enabled and the media reaches the
“stop” position of one segment, the playback automatically
skips ahead to the “start” position of the next segment,
thereby bypassing commercials. If, on the other hand, Au-
toHop is not enabled, the program plays back normally,
showing all commercials, and even with AutoHop enabled,
a user can manually rewind or fast-forward into a commer-
cial and the commercial will not be skipped.
During trial, Defendants-Appellees moved for JMOL of
noninfringement. In March 2023, a jury found infringe-
ment of both patents and awarded damages to ClearPlay.
Following the jury verdict, the district court granted De-
fendants-Appellees’ JMOL motion.
ClearPlay appealed. We have jurisdiction under
28 U.S.C. § 1295(a)(1).
D ISCUSSION
ClearPlay argues that in granting JMOL, the district
court (1) applied claim constructions not given to the jury
and (2) applied the wrong standard to its review of the trial
evidence.
A. Claim Construction
A jury verdict “must be tested by the charge actually
given and by giving the ordinary meaning of the language
of the jury instruction.” Hewlett-Packard Co. v. Mustek
Sys., Inc., 340 F.3d 1314, 1321 (Fed. Cir. 2003). That said,
a district court, in deciding a JMOL motion, does not com-
mit error if it “clarifie[s] [a] previous construction that was
already present in the jury instructions.” Mformation
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CLEARPLAY , INC. v. DISH NETWORK L. L. C. 5
Techs., Inc. v. Rsch. in Motion Ltd., 764 F.3d 1392, 1398
(Fed. Cir. 2014); accord Cordis Corp. v. Bos. Sci. Corp., 658
F.3d 1347, 1357 (Fed. Cir. 2011).
i. ’970 Patent
ClearPlay argues that the JMOL order used a different
construction of the “disabling” limitation of the ’970 Patent
from the one used in the jury instructions. We disagree.
The jury was instructed that the ’970 Patent required “di-
rectly disabl[ing] a navigation object so that its filtering ac-
tion is ignored, as opposed to disabling something other
than the navigation object that results in the navigation
object’s filtering action being ignored.” J.A. 267. In the
JMOL order, the court pointed out that the limitation did
not include “acting on or disabling something else that in-
directly affects the segment bookmark or simply results in
the segment bookmarks being ignored.” J.A. 64. That fur-
ther explanation did not change the claim construction be-
ing applied. It simply restated, with slightly different
phrasing, the same distinction between acting on an object
itself and acting on something upstream of the object.
ii. ’799 Patent
ClearPlay also argues that the JMOL order deviated
from the jury instructions in its construction of the “object
store” limitation of the ’799 Patent. Again, we find that
argument unpersuasive. The jury was instructed that a
“navigation object” within the meaning of that patent re-
quired “the start, stop, and filter elements that comprise
the navigation object [to] be contained within the same ob-
ject, file, or data structure,” J.A. 266–67, and that a “con-
figuration identifier” within the meaning of that patent
needed “to be contained within the navigation object,” J.A.
267. The JMOL order required “each particular navigation
object [to] define its own start position, stop position, and
filtering action, and contain its own configuration identi-
fier,” J.A. 74, and referred to this construction as a “single-
object approach,” J.A. 73. Neither the addition of “its own”
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CLEARPLAY , INC. v. DISH NETWORK L. L. C. 6
nor the reference to a “single-object approach” changed the
operative claim construction. These were superficial dif-
ferences in word choice that did not alter the underlying
meaning of the claim constructions—that every navigation
object needed to contain a start position, a stop position, a
filtering action, and a configuration identifier within itself,
as opposed to those elements being defined outside of the
navigation object.
B. Judgment as a Matter of Law
There was no error in the claim constructions employed
by the district court in granting JMOL. Nonetheless, for
the avoidance of doubt, we rely here on the jury instruc-
tions themselves in considering whether the trial record
entitled Defendants-Appellees to JMOL.
“We review a district court’s grant of JMOL de novo,
applying the law from the regional circuit.” Kinetic Con-
cepts, Inc. v. Smith & Nephew, Inc., 688 F.3d 1342, 1356
(Fed. Cir. 2012) (citing Harris Corp. v. Ericsson Inc., 417
F.3d 1241, 1248 (Fed. Cir. 2005)). In the Tenth Circuit,
JMOL “is appropriate only if the evidence points but one
way and is susceptible to no reasonable inferences which
may support the nonmoving party’s position.” Bay v. Ana-
darko E&P Onshore LLC, 73 F.4th 1207, 1215 (10th Cir.
2023) (quoting Escue v. N. Okla. Coll., 450 F.3d 1146, 1156
(10th Cir. 2006)). Accordingly, we “draw all inferences
from the evidence in favor of the nonmoving party, [with-
out] . . . weigh[ing] the evidence or judg[ing] witness credi-
bility.” Id. (quoting Henry v. Storey, 658 F.3d 1235, 1238
(10th Cir. 2011)).
i. ’970 Patent
ClearPlay argues that there was adequate evidence at
trial to support the jury verdict regarding the infringement
of the ’970 Patent. We disagree.
To show infringement of the ’970 Patent, ClearPlay
needed to prove that AutoHop caused a navigation object
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CLEARPLAY , INC. v. DISH NETWORK L. L. C. 7
to be “directly disable[d]” (emphasis added), as opposed to
“something other than the navigation object” being disa-
bled with the result that “the navigation object’s filtering
action [is] ignored.” ClearPlay argues that AutoHop in-
fringes the ’970 Patent’s disabling-navigation-objects limi-
tation because AutoHop’s commercial skipping can be
negated, either by not enabling it in the first place, result-
ing in all commercials playing, or by fast-forwarding or re-
winding into a commercial, thus allowing that particular
commercial to play.
The trial evidence established that the AutoHop code
runs in the background even when a viewer has not ena-
bled the AutoHop feature, but that AutoHop only skips
commercials if (1) a user has enabled it prior to starting an
episode and (2) the episode is playing, not in fast-forward
or rewind. These two conditions (AutoHop on and episode
playing) are encoded in separate variables within the Au-
toHop source code. When AutoHop encounters a segment
bookmark, it checks whether both conditions are satisfied.
If the user has enabled commercial skipping and the device
is not in rewind or fast-forward, AutoHop skips the com-
mercial; otherwise, it lets the commercial play.
That evidence permitted only one conclusion: AutoHop
did not provide for the direct disablement of navigation ob-
jects. The conditions discussed above render AutoHop ac-
tive or inactive on a categorical basis. At the end of a given
segment, AutoHop does not check whether the next com-
mercial has been enabled or disabled, it checks whether
commercial skipping is enabled writ large and if the device
is in play mode. Those background conditions, rather than
the direct disablement of particular segments, determine
AutoHop’s behavior, and for that reason, AutoHop does not
directly disable navigation objects.
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CLEARPLAY , INC. v. DISH NETWORK L. L. C. 8
ii. ’799 Patent
ClearPlay also argues that there was adequate evi-
dence at trial to support the jury verdict as to infringement
of the ’799 Patent. Again, we disagree.
To show infringement of the ’799 Patent, ClearPlay
needed to prove that AutoHop makes use of an “object
store” containing a “collection . . . [of] navigation objects,”
J.A. 268, that “the start, stop, and filter elements that com-
prise the navigation object . . . be contained within the
same object, file, or data structure,” J.A. 266–67, and that
a “configuration identifier . . . be contained within the nav-
igation object,” J.A. 267. ClearPlay argues that AutoHop
infringed the ’799 Patent’s method of transmitting naviga-
tion objects in an “object store” structure, because the Au-
toHop announcement files contain all of the elements of an
object store.
The evidence at trial established that the segment
bookmark pairs identified points with the first being when
AutoHop would skip ahead (at the “end” marker of one seg-
ment) and the second being when it would resume (at the
“start” marker of the next segment). No evidence was in-
troduced in support of the conclusion that each segment
bookmark pair was actually accompanied by an individual
configuration identifier and filtering action. Rather,
ClearPlay’s expert witness, Nicholas Feamster, noted that
each announcement file contained a single configuration
identifier that matched that announcement file to the par-
ticular set-top box, and that the code did not check this
pairing again each time a new segment bookmark was en-
countered. Feamster further testified that it would be in-
efficient to write code that repeatedly defined the same
filtering method and configuration identifier, and that to
avoid that inefficiency, each segment bookmark pair relied
on the same filtering action and configuration identifier,
both of which were contained in the announcement file it-
self. Crediting that testimony, it is still not possible to
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CLEARPLAY , INC. v. DISH NETWORK L. L. C. 9
conclude that AutoHop infringed the ’799 Patent, because
the operative claim construction required that each navi-
gation object “contain” a filtering action and configuration
identifier. If those objects are simply inherited or implied
from another part of the code, they do not fit that limita-
tion.
Nor is it possible to set aside that distinction under the
doctrine of equivalents, as ClearPlay argues in the alterna-
tive. Though Feamster testified that assigning each seg-
ment bookmark pair its own configuration identifier and
filtering action would be “ridiculous,” whether a particular
method is wise does not bear on whether that method “per-
forms ‘substantially the same function in substantially the
same way to obtain the same result’” as the other. Mylan
Institutional LLC v. Aurobindo Pharma Ltd., 857 F.3d 858,
866 (Fed Cir. 2017) (quoting Graver Tank & Mfg. Co. v.
Linde Air Prods. Co., 339 U.S. 605, 608 (1950)). Here, the
trial record does not contain any other “particularized tes-
timony and linking argument as to the insubstantiality of
the differences between” AutoHop’s announcement files
and the structure described by the ’799 Patent. NexStep,
Inc. v. Comcast Cable Commc’ns, LLC, 119 F.4th 1355,
1371 (Fed Cir. 2024) (quoting VLSI Tech. LLC v. Intel
Corp., 87 F.4th 1332, 1343 (Fed Cir. 2023)). Moreover,
ClearPlay’s theory would erase the claims’ meaningful
structural and functional distinction between a “single-ob-
ject” approach and one that shares elements across multi-
ple objects, even though the ’799 Patent treats that
distinction as one “in kind,” not degree. Freedman Seating
v. Am. Seating, 420 F.3d 1350, 1361 (Fed. Cir. 2005) (cita-
tion omitted). We thus reject ClearPlay’s alternative argu-
ment.
CONCLUSION
We have considered ClearPlay’s remaining arguments
and find them unpersuasive. For the foregoing reasons, we
affirm the district court’s decision granting JMOL of
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noninfringement of claims 28 and 33 of the ’970 Patent and
claim 12 of the ’799 Patent.
AFFIRMED
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