Induced infringement is a form of liability for indirect patent infringement. Until recently, in order to establish that a defendant induced another party to infringe a patented method, the patent plaintiff had to establish that one party, either by itself or through its agents, directly infringed the patented method by performing all of the claimed steps.
However, in Akamai Technologies v. Limelight Networks, 692 F.3d 1301 (Fed. Cir. 2012), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit handed down a game-changing decision concerning what constitutes induced infringement. Prior to Akamai, the patentee had to prove induced infringement by showing that a single entity was induced to perform each step of a method patent. However, this changed when the Federal Court decided that induced infringement could be achieved by multiple parties performing the various steps of a patented method.
