[U.S. Patents] Cloud of Change v. NCR (Fed. Cir. 2024)
Updated: 1 hour ago
Article information
Article type: Case note
Category: United States
Topics: Confusion
First published on this website: 2026-11-01
Display and classification checked: November 2, 2026
Originally published on Ameblo: 2025-06-19 (Japan time). Full English translation.
[U.S. Patents] Cloud of Change v. NCR (Fed. Cir. 2024)
The court examined in detail who constitutes the entity “using” a claimed system and whether the customers' acts could be attributed to defendant NCR (vicarious liability), and rejected direct infringement by the defendant.
⇒ For system claims, it is advisable to assert active inducement (35 U.S.C. § 271(b)) and contributory infringement (35 U.S.C. § 271(c)). (In this case, the plaintiff had abandoned inducement and contributory-infringement claims.)
1. The Entity Performing “Use”
Referring to Centillion, the court stated that the entity “using” a claimed system is the one that “controls the system as a whole and obtains benefit from it.”
Here, “benefit” means not merely earning monetary revenue but enjoying the purpose and effect recited in the claims—that is, the essential advantages achieved by the invention.
Because the patent claims aim at constructing and editing POS terminals and using a system permitting repeated interaction with POS software over a network, the customers actually enjoy the system's intended purpose and effects.
2. Whether “Vicarious Liability” Is Established
For method claims, as stated in Akamai, even when a third party other than the accused infringer performs some of the steps, the accused infringer may be liable if it directs or controls that conduct or has a special relationship with the third party, such as agency or a contractual relationship.
However, the court pointed out that this case concerns system claims, where the central issue is to whom “use” is attributed, and the analysis differs from that for method claims.
It therefore rejected the district court's analysis attempting directly to apply Akamai-type “vicarious liability” to system claims as conflating the issues.
The approach in Akamai of examining and aggregating who performed each individual step of a method claim cannot simply be imported into the “use” analysis for a system claim.
For system claims, one must evaluate as a whole “who enjoys the invention's purpose and effects resulting from operation of all the system's constituent elements.”
Accordingly, the perspective at issue in Akamai, such as “whether a third party was directed to perform a particular step,” does not apply to system claims in that same form.
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November 1, 2026: First published on this website.
November 2, 2026: Added article information, classification, topics, language navigation, related articles where the same case was confirmed, consultation guidance, and SEO. The original text and first-published date were preserved.
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