Judge overturns $469M patent infringement verdict against Dish

A Utah federal judge has struck down a $469 million patent infringement verdict against Dish Network.

The plaintiff, parental control service ClearPlay, had claimed Dish’s Autohop technology, which allows consumers to skip commercials on Dish’s Hopper DVR, infringed on two patents. EchoStar, the manufacturer of set top boxes containing the feature, is also a defendant in the lawsuit, which was filed in 2014.

The court’s decision comes just over a week after a civil jury unanimously ruled in favor of ClearPlay, imposing the original verdict for damages, and Dish filed a motion challenging the outcome. The jury also determined Dish did not intentionally infringe on ClearPlay’s patents.

U.S. District Judge David Nutter, who is overseeing the case, informed Dish and ClearPlay of the reversal on a Tuesday Zoom conference. Nutter gave an oral ruling stating ClearPlay doesn’t have sufficient evidence to make a claim for infringement.

“Because the methods of the Accused Products do not practice the Asserted Claims of the 970 and 799 Patents and do not directly infringe the Asserted Claims, ClearPlay’s claims for literal infringement, infringement under the doctrine of equivalents, induced infringement, and willful infringement fail as a matter of law,” said the court docket.

For Dish’s part, the company issued a statement saying it “has stood firm in its belief that it did not infringe ClearPlay’s patents, and is gratified by the Court’s ruling.”

In filings from earlier this month, Dish rebuffed some of ClearPlay’s claims, one of which was that Dish customers used AutoHop to watch a program without ads but then chose to fast forward or rewind into a commercial, allegedly infringing on the ClearPlay patents. 

Another infringement claim ClearPlay offered, according to Dish, was if a user selected “No thanks” to disable the AutoHop feature, meaning they then used the video-skipping technology in question to fast forward through commercials. 

“ClearPlay presented no testimony that any Dish customer has ever 'disabled' AutoHop in that way, which is not the recommended or intended way to use AutoHop,” wrote Dish. “Rather, the evidence shows that Dish’s customers turn on AutoHop and then put down the remote to watch a show commercial-free.”

Furthermore, Dish argued ClearPlay provided no evidence that Dish’s engineers knew about ClearPlay’s technology or its patents before the suit was filed.

Dish added its AutoHop technology is designed to address the problem of skipping commercials in broadcast TV, “when the segments vary across each market.” And that technology differs from ClearPlay’s business, which is to “automatically filter offensive content” from titles across DVD and streaming.

The overturned verdict comes as Dish faces the aftermath of a cybersecurity incident in February, which caused an outage across the company’s internal communications, customer call centers and internet sites.

Dish has yet to issue a statement detailing the exact cause for the outage or whether any sensitive data was stolen. This week, Dish’s stock plummeted to a five-year low of $9.25.