ClearPlay, Inc. v. DISH Network — Federal Circuit Affirms AutoHop Does Not Infringe Content Filtering Patents

Background

ClearPlay holds patents on methods for filtering multimedia content. The key technology involves dividing media into “navigation objects,” each with a start position, stop position, and a filtering action (such as skipping). By disabling specific navigation objects, a viewer can selectively filter out portions of a program.

In 2014, ClearPlay sued DISH Network, alleging that DISH’s AutoHop feature—which lets viewers skip commercials on recorded television programs—infringed claims in two of its patents: U.S. Patent No. 7,577,970 (the “’970 Patent”) and U.S. Patent No. 6,898,799 (the “’799 Patent”). After a jury found infringement and awarded damages, the District of Utah granted DISH’s motion for judgment as a matter of law (JMOL), overturning the verdict. ClearPlay appealed to the Federal Circuit.

The Court’s Holding

The Federal Circuit affirmed the district court’s JMOL of noninfringement on both patents.

On the ’970 Patent, the court found that AutoHop does not “directly disable” navigation objects as the patent claims require. Trial evidence showed that AutoHop operates on a categorical basis: it checks two system-wide conditions—whether the user has enabled commercial skipping and whether the device is in normal play mode. AutoHop does not evaluate individual segment bookmarks to determine whether each one should be disabled. Because the system acts on global settings rather than disabling particular navigation objects, it falls outside the patent’s claims.

On the ’799 Patent, the court found that AutoHop’s announcement files do not meet the patent’s requirement that each navigation object individually “contain” a configuration identifier and filtering action. DISH’s system uses a single configuration identifier per announcement file, applied once at the file level rather than embedded within each segment bookmark pair. Even though ClearPlay’s expert acknowledged this design and called per-object embedding “ridiculous” as an engineering matter, the claim construction required each navigation object to contain those elements internally. The court also rejected ClearPlay’s doctrine of equivalents argument, finding insufficient evidence of functional equivalence and noting that the theory would erase a meaningful structural distinction in the patent claims.

Key Takeaways

• Categorical vs. per-object control matters for infringement. A system that toggles filtering on or off as a whole does not necessarily “disable” individual content objects, even if the practical result—skipping certain segments—is similar.
• Claim language about containment is taken literally. When a patent requires that elements be “contained within” a data object, inheriting or sharing those elements from a parent structure does not satisfy the limitation.
• Engineering efficiency is not a doctrine-of-equivalents argument. Proving that a patented design would be impractical to implement does not establish that an alternative achieves substantially the same result in substantially the same way.

Why It Matters

This decision reinforces that courts will closely examine how accused systems are actually architected, not just what they accomplish. DISH’s AutoHop and ClearPlay’s patented method both achieve content filtering, but they differ in a legally critical way: AutoHop uses system-level settings to control playback, while the patents describe per-object disabling within a structured data framework. For technology companies designing content management and filtering features, the case underscores the importance of understanding how patent claim language maps to specific software architectures—small structural differences can determine whether a product infringes or not.