In CDN news this past weekend, a judge has overturned the jury verdict in the Akamai vs. Limelight patent infringement case. Akamai has said it intends to appeal.

The judge cited Muniauction v. Thomson Corp. as the precedent for a judgement of law, which basically says that if you have a method claim in a patent that involves steps performed by multiple parties, you cannot claim direct infringement unless one party exercises control over the entire process.

I have not read the court filing yet, but based on the citation of precedent, it’s a good guess that because the CDN patent methods generally involve steps beyond the provider’s control, it falls under this citation. Unexpected, at least to me, and for those IP law watchers among you, rather fascinating, since in our increasingly federated, distributed, outsourced IT world, this would seem to raise a host of intellectual property issues for multi-party transactions, which are in some ways inherent to web services.