Court Opinion

ID: 9841420
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-22 14:00:44.703695+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:52:31.587501
License: Public Domain

Case: 22-1623    Document: 62    Page: 1   Filed: 09/22/2023

        NOTE: This disposition is nonprecedential.

   United States Court of Appeals
       for the Federal Circuit
                  ______________________

    CADDO SYSTEMS, INC., 511 TECHNOLOGIES,
                      INC.,
              Plaintiffs-Appellants

                            v.

      SIEMENS AKTIENGESELLSCHAFT (AG),
           SIEMENS INDUSTRY, INC.,
               Defendants-Appellees
              ______________________

                        2022-1623
                  ______________________

    Appeal from the United States District Court for the
 Northern District of Illinois in No. 1:20-cv-05927, Judge
 Thomas M. Durkin.
                 ______________________

                Decided: September 22, 2023
                  ______________________

    ALEX CHAN, Devlin Law Firm LLC, Wilmington, DE,
 argued for plaintiffs-appellants. Also represented by
 TIMOTHY DEVLIN.

     KRISTIN L. CLEVELAND, Klarquist Sparkman, LLP,
 Portland, OR, argued for defendants-appellees. Also rep-
 resented by SARAH ELISABETH JELSEMA; SALUMEH LOESCH,
 Scale LLP, San Francisco, CA.
Case: 22-1623     Document: 62     Page: 2    Filed: 09/22/2023

 2   CADDO SYSTEMS, INC. v. SIEMENS AKTIENGESELLSCHAFT (AG)

                   ______________________

  Before MOORE, Chief Judge, REYNA and TARANTO, Circuit
                         Judges.
 TARANTO, Circuit Judge.
     This is a patent-infringement action by Caddo Sys-
 tems, Inc. and 511 Technologies, Inc. (collectively, Caddo)
 against Siemens Aktiengesellschaft (AG) and Siemens In-
 dustry, Inc. 1 The district court entered summary judgment
 for Siemens Industry based on an agreement between
 Caddo and Microsoft settling earlier litigation. Caddo Sys-
 tems, Inc. v. Siemens Aktiengesellschaft (AG), No. 20 C
 05927, 2022 WL 444134 (N.D. Ill. Feb. 11, 2022) (Caddo I).
 The district court then dismissed Caddo’s complaint
 against Siemens AG for lack of personal jurisdiction.
 Caddo Systems, Inc. v. Siemens Aktiengesellschaft (AG),
 No. 20 C 05927, 2022 WL 704779 (N.D. Ill. Mar. 9, 2022)
 (Caddo II). Caddo timely appeals both rulings. We have
 jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1295(a)(1). We affirm both
 rulings.
     Caddo asserted six related patents: U.S. Patent Nos.
 7,191,411; 7,216,301; 7,640,517; 7,725,836; 8,352,880; and
 10,037,127. The ’411 patent was the earliest, and all later
 ones derive from it. Caddo has summarized the asserted
 patents as “directed towards claim methods for navigating
 an information structure by, for example, providing a
 graphical user interface displaying and enabling the selec-
 tion of an ‘active path’ and ‘active links’ once the ‘active
 path’ and the ‘active links’ are ‘automatically constructed.’”
 J.A. 2362. Alleging infringement, Caddo accused two

     1   The original complaint named Siemens Digital In-
 dustries Software, Inc., but that company was replaced,
 through an amended complaint, by Siemens Industry, Inc.
Case: 22-1623     Document: 62      Page: 3    Filed: 09/22/2023

 CADDO SYSTEMS, INC. v. SIEMENS AKTIENGESELLSCHAFT (AG)       3

 products: Siemens Industry’s Desigo CC software and Sie-
 mens AG’s website. J.A. 2418–19.
     The summary-judgment record concerning Siemens In-
 dustry showed the following: In Desigo CC, the accused
 functionality is provided by the “RadBreadcrumb” software
 supplied to Siemens Industry “by third-party software pro-
 vider Telerik.” Caddo I, at *3; see J.A. 2404. RadBread-
 crumb is “built on top of” certain Microsoft software—the
 .NET framework and its subsystem, Windows Presentation
 Foundation (WPF). J.A. 2406, 2410; see Caddo I, at *3.
 .NET and its WPF component act as an application-devel-
 opment platform and provide “a collection of libraries that
 contribute to creating user interface applications in . . . the
 Microsoft environment.” J.A. 2386; see Caddo I, at *3. Alt-
 hough .NET, standing alone, does not provide the accused
 functionality, RadBreadcrumb uses .NET to render all
 RadBreadcrumb’s visual components (e.g., boxes, links,
 and menu items) for display on a computer screen and to
 detect all user interactions with the computer, including
 via keyboard or mouse. J.A. 2387–93; see Caddo I, at *3.
 The district court, summarizing the record, stated that the
 corporate representatives of both Siemens Industry and
 Telerik “testified that RadBreadcrumb will not work with-
 out Microsoft technology”—specifically, without .NET—
 and Caddo “cited to no evidence contradicting these facts.”
 Caddo I, at *5; see J.A. 2413–14; J.A. 2387–93.
     Before the present action was filed, litigation between
 Microsoft and Caddo was resolved by a “Settlement and Li-
 cense Agreement” dated April 18, 2017. J.A. 2366–67.
 That Settlement Agreement contains license, release, and
 covenant-not-to-sue provisions that limit Caddo’s actions
 regarding, among other things, the Caddo patents at issue
 here and certain third-party (non-Microsoft) products. As
 relevant here, the key definitional provision, § 1.5(b),
 reaches third-party products “to the extent that they are
 combined with, used with or aggregated with [a Microsoft
 product], but only the portion of such combination, usage
Case: 22-1623     Document: 62     Page: 4    Filed: 09/22/2023

 4   CADDO SYSTEMS, INC. v. SIEMENS AKTIENGESELLSCHAFT (AG)

 or aggregation that consists of or uses [a Microsoft prod-
 uct].” J.A. 2367.
     Siemens Industry moved for summary judgment on the
 ground that the Settlement Agreement protected it from
 the infringement liability Caddo alleged. J.A. 1719, 1722–
 43. Siemens Industry pointed to extensive record evidence
 demonstrating that the entirety of RadBreadcrumb—the
 accused instrumentality—uses and, indeed, would not
 function without .NET. See, e.g., J.A. 1730–1736, 1739,
 1740–43; see also J.A. 2413–14, 2387–93. The district court
 granted Siemens Industry’s motion. Caddo I, at *7. The
 court concluded that the summary-judgment record re-
 quired a finding that “RadBreadcrumb’s source code ac-
 complishes [the accused functionality] by using various
 pieces of .NET” and that “RadBreadcrumb will not work
 without Microsoft technology.” Id. at *5. The court held
 that RadBreadcrumb “is ‘combined with’ or ‘used with’ Mi-
 crosoft technology, if not both,” bringing it within the Set-
 tlement Agreement’s § 1.5(b) coverage, id., and that the
 Settlement Agreement therefore protected Siemens Indus-
 try from this action through its license, release, and cove-
 nant-not-to-sue provisions, id. at *6.
     We affirm that ruling. Caddo’s main argument on ap-
 peal of that ruling invokes § 1.5(b)’s limitation of the Set-
 tlement Agreement’s scope (as relevant here) to “only the
 portion” of a third-party product “that consists of or uses”
 a Microsoft product. Caddo’s Opening Br. at 14–28. Caddo
 argues that only a “portion,” and not the entirety, of Rad-
 Breadcrumb “consists of or uses” .NET. Id. at 15–17. We
 reject this argument.
     To justify our setting aside the summary judgment rul-
 ing for this reason, Caddo had to show on appeal, at the
 least, that it presented to the district court (in its opposi-
 tion to the motion for summary judgment) evidence of a
 portion of the accused functionality of RadBreadcrumb
 that did not use .NET, where the presented evidence
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 CADDO SYSTEMS, INC. v. SIEMENS AKTIENGESELLSCHAFT (AG)       5

 created a triable issue in the face of Siemens Industry’s as-
 sertion and evidence that all of the accused functionality
 used .NET. Caddo failed to do so. The only relevant pas-
 sages from Caddo’s opposition to the summary-judgment
 motion cited to this court are J.A. 2350–51, cited in Caddo’s
 Reply Brief at 2–4, and J.A. 2347, cited in response to ques-
 tioning at the oral argument (at 21:30–52). Those cited
 passages do not identify the needed evidence: J.A. 2350–51
 cites no relevant record evidence of RadBreadcrumb fea-
 tures, and neither does J.A. 2347, which merely asserts de-
 ficiencies in some testimonial evidence cited by Siemens
 Industry. Neither passage refers to evidence of a portion
 of RadBreadcrumb that does not “use” .NET for the accused
 functionality—even though Caddo, as a party to the Settle-
 ment Agreement, was well-positioned to understand the
 Agreement’s terms and to produce the crucial evidence if it
 existed.
      In these circumstances, even aside from whether
 Caddo adequately preserved its present “portion” conten-
 tion in the district court, Caddo has not shown that the dis-
 trict court erred in granting summary judgment. “[W]here
 a non-moving party denies a factual allegation by the party
 moving for summary judgment, that denial must include a
 specific reference to the affidavit or other part of the record
 that supports such a denial.” Ammons v. Aramark Uni-
 form Services, Inc., 368 F.3d 809, 817 (7th Cir. 2004); see
 also Cummins, Inc. v. TAS Distributing Co., 700 F.3d 1329,
 1334–35 (Fed. Cir. 2012) (applying regional circuit law on
 the standard of review for summary-judgment rulings).
 Caddo has not shown on appeal that it met the standard to
 avoid summary judgment finding coverage by § 1.5(b). And
 we conclude, as the district court did, that coverage by
 § 1.5(b) bars Caddo from succeeding in this infringement
 case. See Caddo I, at *6 & n.3 (applying release, license,
 and covenant-not-to-sue provisions and noting reasons why
 § 4.4 does not save Caddo’s lawsuit against Siemens Indus-
 try given that § 1.5(b) applies).
Case: 22-1623     Document: 62     Page: 6    Filed: 09/22/2023

 6   CADDO SYSTEMS, INC. v. SIEMENS AKTIENGESELLSCHAFT (AG)

     We also affirm the district court’s grant of Siemens
 AG’s motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction.
 Siemens AG is a German company, organized and existing
 under German law, with principal places of business in
 Munich and Berlin, and it has had no U.S. offices, no U.S.
 places of business, and no U.S. employees since at least
 February 2020, before this suit commenced. Caddo II, at
 *1; J.A. 807–08. Siemens AG’s website was developed and
 is maintained and hosted outside the United States, and
 the website does not provide a direct means to buy products
 from or sell products to Siemens AG. Caddo II, at *2, *6–
 7; J.A. 810, 1129. For those reasons, and for others recited
 by the district court, we see no error in the district court’s
 conclusions, first, that there was no general personal juris-
 diction over Siemens AG, Caddo II, at *5, relying on, e.g.,
 Daimler AG v. Bauman, 571 U.S. 117 (2014), and, second,
 that there was no specific personal jurisdiction based on
 the accused conduct—the operation of the Siemens AG
 website, Caddo II, at *6–7, relying on, e.g., Synthes (U.S.A.)
 v. G.M. Dos Reis Jr. Ind. Com de Equip. Medico, 563 F.3d
 1285 (Fed. Cir. 2009), and NexLearn, LLC v. Allen Interac-
 tions, Inc., 859 F.3d 1371 (Fed. Cir. 2017).
     We have considered Caddo’s remaining arguments and
 find no persuasive basis in any of them for setting aside the
 district court’s rulings on appeal. For the foregoing rea-
 sons, we affirm the district court’s decisions granting Sie-
 mens Industry’s motion for summary judgment and
 granting Siemens AG’s motion to dismiss.
                         AFFIRMED