## Facts

- Suffolk Technologies, LLC owned U.S. Patent No. 6,081,835, directed to controlling a file server that supplies files to web-page-rendering computers based on the referring web page address.
- Suffolk sued Google Inc. and AOL Inc. for patent infringement in the Eastern District of Virginia; AOL settled.
- Google asserted invalidity, relying on a 1995 Usenet newsgroup exchange about identifying the web page that called a CGI script using HTTP referrer information.
- The district court construed the claims and granted summary judgment that claims 1, 7, and 9 were anticipated under 35 U.S.C. § 102 by the Usenet post.
- After those rulings, Suffolk stipulated that claim 6 was also anticipated.
- Suffolk appealed, disputing whether the Usenet post qualified as a § 102 “printed publication” and challenging the anticipation determination.

## Issues

1. Whether a 1995 Usenet newsgroup post was a “printed publication” under 35 U.S.C. § 102 because it was publicly accessible to persons of ordinary skill in the art exercising reasonable diligence.
2. Whether the Usenet post disclosed every limitation of asserted claims 1, 6, 7, and 9 of the patent, rendering them anticipated and invalid for lack of novelty.

## Decision

- The Federal Circuit affirmed summary judgment that the asserted claims were invalid for lack of novelty under 35 U.S.C. § 102.
- The court held the Usenet post qualified as a “printed publication” because it was publicly accessible at the time of posting to persons of ordinary skill in the art using reasonable diligence.
- The court rejected Suffolk’s contention that the newsgroup audience consisted mostly of beginners, concluding the record supported that persons of ordinary skill used such newsgroups at the relevant time.
- The court held ease of later searchability was not required where the reference was sufficiently disseminated when published.
- The court agreed that the post disclosed the claimed method of using referrer information to decide which file, if any, to supply, satisfying anticipation for the asserted claims (including claim 6 by stipulation).

## Legal Principles

- Whether a reference is a § 102 “printed publication” is a legal conclusion based on underlying factual determinations.
- “Public accessibility” is the touchstone for printed-publication status under § 102.
- A reference is publicly accessible if it was disseminated or otherwise made available so that persons interested and ordinarily skilled in the art, exercising reasonable diligence, could locate it at the relevant time.
- A reference need not be easily searchable after publication if it was sufficiently disseminated at the time of its publication.
- A single prior-art reference anticipates if it discloses each and every limitation of the claimed invention, as properly construed.

## Conclusion

The Federal Circuit affirmed invalidity because a 1995 Usenet post was publicly accessible to the relevant technical community and disclosed the use of HTTP referrer information to control what a server supplies, anticipating the asserted claims under § 102.


Suffolk Techs., LLC v. AOL Inc., 752 F.3d 1358 (Fed. Cir. 2014)