Untitled case

I'll research this case systematically, starting with the Federal Circuit docket and the patent itself.

Key lead identified: Fed. Cir. 21-2268 appears to be Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC v. Sling TV. Let me verify the parties, patents, and district court posture.

The metadata's patent mapping needs verification — 21-2268 is the Sling/DISH appeal, but I need to pin down how the '442 fits. Let me dig into the '442 patent itself and the ARRIS track of the case.

Case Overview: Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC v. Sling TV, L.L.C., No. 2021-2268 (Fed. Cir.)

Parties and posture. The appellant is Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC ("RAS"), a patent-holding affiliate of Realtime Data LLC (Woodcliff Lake, NJ) whose portfolio descends from inventor James Fallon; RAS does not appear to sell any product, and its revenue model is licensing and enforcement — trade-press coverage and the litigation record treat the Realtime entities as non-practicing patent assertion entities (I did not locate a judicial finding using the NPE/PAE label in the materials reviewed). The appellees are DISH Network L.L.C., DISH Technologies L.L.C., Sling TV L.L.C., and Sling Media L.L.C. (with Sling Media, Inc. and EchoStar Technologies LLC also named in the caption) — i.e., the satellite TV and OTT streaming operator and its technology affiliates. RAS sued on August 31, 2017 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, No. 1:17-cv-02097-RBJ, before Judge R. Brooke Jackson, asserting U.S. Patent Nos. 8,275,897, 8,867,610 and 8,934,535 (the '897 patent was dropped by amended complaint that October); the case was later consolidated with RAS's 2019 suit against ARRIS Solutions, Inc. (D. Colo. No. 1:19-cv-00585), and the '442, '298 and '777 patents were asserted against ARRIS only, with just claim 8 of the '442 patent pleaded in the complaint. Colorado was the natural forum because DISH/Sling are headquartered there, making venue proper under 28 U.S.C. § 1400(b) as the defendants' place of residence (my inference from the parties' domiciles, not a stated court holding). The appeal at No. 2021-2268 was taken from the district court's July 31, 2021 summary-judgment order and final judgment (ECF Nos. 305, 306) holding the remaining asserted '610 claims ineligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101; on May 11, 2023, a per curiam panel (Lourie, Hughes, Stark) affirmed without opinion under Fed. Cir. R. 36. RAS was represented by Brian D. Ledahl and colleagues of Russ August & Kabat; DISH/Sling by Adam Shartzer and colleagues of Fish & Richardson.

Asserted patents and accused technology. The accused technology is the defendants' streaming video products and services — the Sling TV OTT service and DISH's streaming/DVR offerings — which RAS alleged practiced its data-compression claims. The patents are continuations sharing a common specification and a Feb. 13, 2001 priority date (provisional 60/268,394), all tracing to U.S. Patent No. 7,386,046 and colloquially called the "Fallon Patents." A one-line sketch of each: the '610 patent ("System and Methods for Video and Audio Data Distribution") claims selecting, for a block of video/audio data, one of several compression algorithms based on a parameter or attribute of the data and a throughput of a communication channel; the '535 patent claims analogous compression selection using asymmetric compressors keyed to data access profile/throughput; and the '442 patent — the patent the case metadata ties to this appeal — is a continuation issued January 6, 2015 from Application No. 14/134,933, with decompression-side claims: claims 1–15 cover decompressing a compressed video/audio data block (compressed using an algorithm chosen from a plurality based on the throughput of a communication channel and a data parameter/attribute) and storing the decompressed data, while claims 16–29 substitute "frequency of access" as the selection criterion, with at least one algorithm being asymmetric. That the '442 claims are drafted from the receiver/decompression end is likely why it was pitched at a set-top-box/video-infrastructure vendor such as ARRIS rather than only at the streamer.

IPR linkage, why it matters, and an important sourcing caveat. The case is a clean specimen of the § 101/PTAB pincer that confronted compression and adaptive-streaming patents after Alice: RAS's claims were attacked in parallel at the Board — Adobe's IPR2019-00712 and ARRIS's IPR2019-01222 on '442 claims 1–15, with ARRIS's IPR2019-01585/01586 on claims 16–29 denied institution on March 16, 2020 — while the district court stayed the case for the IPRs, claims 1–14 of the '535 patent were held unpatentable (leading RAS to withdraw the '535), and the USPTO's ex parte reexamination rejected claim 1 of the '610 patent. After the stay lifted in January 2021, Judge Jackson granted summary judgment of ineligibility on the '610 patent and then awarded DISH/Sling fees under § 285 based on six "red flags." That fee ruling became the more consequential appeal: on August 23, 2024, in No. 2023-1035, the Federal Circuit (Moore, Lourie, and District Judge Alan Albright sitting by designation) vacated the fee award, holding that five of the six red flags — PTAB/reexam obviousness outcomes, DISH's notice letter, and the defense expert's analysis — were not proper bases for exceptionality, while only the Google and Netflix § 101 decisions on the related '535 patent counted. The 2021-2268 merits affirmance itself created no precedent (Rule 36), so its

I'll research this case systematically, starting with identifying the parties and the '442 patent.

The case is Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC v. Sling TV, L.L.C. Let me dig into the docket and rulings.

Important nuance to resolve: the metadata lists the '442 patent, but the D. Colo. record I'm seeing involves different patents. Let me verify both threads.

Case identification — and one important correction

Federal Circuit No. 2021-2268 is Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC v. Sling TV, L.L.C., an appeal from the District of Colorado (No. 1:17-cv-02097-RBJ, Judge R. Brooke Jackson). It ended on 2023-05-11 with a one-line Rule 36 affirmance (per curiam: Lourie, Hughes, Stark) of a summary judgment holding Realtime's patent claims ineligible under § 101.

Metadata caveat, flagged rather than papered over: the case metadata in this prompt lists U.S. Patent 8,929,442 as the patent at issue. That attribution appears to come from Google Patents' litigation table and does not match the appellate record. The patents actually litigated in No. 21-2268 were U.S. 8,867,610 (the '610 patent) and, earlier, 8,934,535 ('535) and 8,275,897 ('897). The '442 patent ("System and methods for video and audio data distribution," Fallon et al.) is from the same Realtime compression portfolio and was litigated and challenged at the PTAB extensively in parallel — so I cover it below as a separate track, but I could not verify that it was ever asserted in the Sling/DISH case itself. Sources: Fed. Cir. Rule 36 judgment, No. 21-2268; D. Colo. Dkt. 305, SJ order, 2021-07-31.

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1. Filing and initial pleadings

Note that this was one of roughly a dozen Realtime suits against Amazon, Cisco, Brightcove, Haivision, Sony, Apple, Adobe, Polycom, Samsung and others. The JPML denied Realtime's motion to centralize them in In re Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC Patent Litig., 326 F. Supp. 3d 1374 (J.P.M.L. 2018), expressly identifying the '442 among the eight patents in the campaign — a decision that left each case to develop its own record and produced divergent § 101 outcomes.

2. Pre-trial motions of substance

• Rule 12(c) eligibility motions (filed Dec. 2017; denied 2018-03-07 hearing). Judge Jackson denied the motions without prejudice, reasoning that claim construction was needed first and noting other districts had rejected Alice challenges to sibling Realtime patents. The court nonetheless tipped its hand: "Maybe this is just an abstract concept. This doesn't sound like something you would patent. It doesn't sound like its technology. It just sounds like an idea." (Mar. 7, 2018 Hr'g Tr. 9:9–14, quoted in Dkt. 234.)
• Motion to stay pending IPR — GRANTED 2019-02-26 (Dkts. 162, 167), shortly after the Markman order. This is the single most consequential procedural ruling in the case: it froze the litigation for nearly two years and let the patent landscape shift underneath Realtime.
• Motion for summary judgment of ineligibility — filed 2021-06-02 (Dkt. 234) with the Bovik declaration (Dkt. 234-1); opposed (Dkt. 267); Realtime cross-moved to exclude Bovik under Rule 702 (Dkt. 237). Granted 2021-07-31 (Dkt. 305). No transfer motion was litigated here.
• Fee motion under § 285 — granted 2022-01-20, while the merits appeal was pending.

3. Claim construction (Markman)

Markman order entered 2019-01-11 (Dkt. 151). Eight terms/term groups were construed across the '610 and '535 patents. The pivotal construction was "throughput of a communication channel," which the court construed to require the number of pending transmission requests to the memory system — a narrow reading Realtime later relied on both for infringement and for § 101 step two, and which the PTAB subsequently rejected in favor of the broader BRI reading in the parallel reexamination. That asymmetry between the district court construction and the Board's construction became a central issue in the fee appeal.

4. Discovery milestones of strategic significance

• Expert discovery (completed spring 2021) produced the Bovik declaration (2021-05-28, revised 2021-06-02) that the court credited in the § 101 ruling — and later identified as the sixth "red flag."
• The IPR record itself functioned as substitute discovery: the Netflix and Google petitions and final written decisions supplied the prior-art and conventionality record that defendants recycled into the summary judgment motion.
• DISH's 2021-02-11 notice letter — sent one month after the stay lifted, reciting the Google/Netflix § 101 losses and the Adaptive Streaming decision and warning that fees would be sought — was a deliberate litigation step designed to build a § 285 record. The Federal Circuit later held the letter alone could not support exceptionality.

5. Trial, verdict, post-trial motions

There was no trial. A jury trial was set for 2021-08-16; the 2021-07-31 summary judgment order dismissed the remaining claims roughly two weeks before trial. Consequently there is no verdict, no JMOL, no new-trial motion in this case. Post-judgment activity was limited to the § 285 fee motion (granted 2022-01-20) and the two appeals.

6. Final disposition and present posture

• On the merits (No. 21-2268): The district court held claims 1, 2, 6, 8–14, 16 and 18 of the '610 patent ineligible under § 101 (claim 1 representative; Alice step one — abstract idea of selecting a compression algorithm based on data characteristics; step two — no inventive concept beyond generic hardware). The Federal Circuit affirmed without opinion on 2023-05-11 under Fed. Cir. R. 36. That affirmance is nonprecedential and has no precedential value, but it is a final, unappealable invalidity judgment as to those claims (Rule 36 affirmances are reviewable only by certior

I'll research this docket. Let me start with several searches in parallel.

Let me pull the actual Federal Circuit docket and related materials.

Bottom line

Case No. 21-2268 is Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC v. Sling TV, L.L.C. (Fed. Cir.), an appeal from the District of Colorado, No. 1:17-cv-02097-RBJ (Judge R. Brooke Jackson). Realtime is the plaintiff‑appellant; DISH/Sling are the defendants‑appellees. The plaintiff's appellate team was a single firm — Russ August & Kabat (Los Angeles) — with Brian D. Ledahl arguing. No local counsel and no in-house counsel of record appear on the Federal Circuit docket.

⚠️ Correction to the case metadata: the appeal is no longer pending. The Federal Circuit entered a Rule 36 judgment affirming on May 11, 2023 (Doc. 61), per curiam (Lourie, Hughes, Stark). See CAFC May 11, 2023 orders page and the CourtListener copy of the judgment. (One aggregator, Patsnap, mislabels the termination as "appeal dismissed" — that is wrong; the disposition was a Rule 36 affirmance.)

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Counsel of record for Plaintiff‑Appellant Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC

All from the Judgment, Doc. 61 (May 11, 2023), which lists counsel who argued plus the full appearance roster, and from Docket Entry #2 (Sept. 14, 2021) — the entry of appearance filed by Reza Mirzaie on behalf of the appellant.

Firm address: Russ August & Kabat, 12424 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90025 (general firm address; the opinions state only "Los Angeles, CA").

Roles not present

• No local counsel of record. None is required at the Federal Circuit, and none appears on the docket.
• No in-house counsel of record. Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC is a patent-assertion entity (affiliate of Realtime Data LLC); its principals did not enter appearances. I found no evidence of in-house counsel signing any brief, motion, or EOA.
• No amicus or separate appellant-side counsel in the docket entries I reviewed.

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For contrast — appellees' counsel (DISH/Sling)

From Entry of Appearance #5 (Sept. 14, 2021) and the judgment: Ruffin B. Cordell, Adam R. Shartzer (argued), Brian J. Livedalen, and Michael J. Ballanco — Fish & Richardson P.C., with Shartzer listed at the Washington, DC office. EchoStar Technologies LLC and Sling Media, Inc. were withdrawn as appellees by revised caption (Doc. 9, Sept. 17, 2021) after failing to file appearances.

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Sourcing and verification notes

• Docket entries relied on: #2 (appellant EOA), #3 (certificate of interest), #4 (docketing statement), #9 (revised caption), #10 (extension motion), #11 (order), #61 (judgment). Docket text retrieved via Justia Dockets and UniCourt.
• Not verified: individual attorneys' current titles (partner vs. associate/of counsel) and current firm affiliations as of today. The "partner" designations above are based on general knowledge of RA&K's roster and should be confirmed against the firm's current website before being relied on in a filing or client memo. I also could not independently confirm the district-court trial team or any Colorado local counsel in No. 1:17-cv-02097-RBJ from the sources available to me; the D. Colo. docket would need to be pulled on PACER to confirm.
• Related later appeals involving the same parties (fee award and follow-on proceedings) include 2023-1035 (oral argument audio) and 25-1529 (July 3, 2025 order). Counsel in those appeals may differ and should be checked separately if you need them.
• The patents actually at issue in the D. Colo. case were Realtime's compression patents (e.g., the '610, '535, '442, '477), and U.S. Patent 8,929,442 — the patent flagged in your metadata — was among the asserted family and was the subject of multiple IPRs (IPR2019-00712 (Adobe), IPR2019-01585/01586 (ARRIS), IPR2018-01439 (Sony)). It was not, however, the patent driving the Rule 36 affirmance, which turned on § 101 eligibility of the '610 patent and the § 285 fee award.

Bottom line

Federal Circuit No. 2021‑2268 is Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC v. Sling TV, L.L.C., Sling Media, L.L.C., DISH Network L.L.C., DISH Technologies L.L.C. (caption also lists Sling Media, Inc. and EchoStar Technologies L.L.C.), an appeal from D. Colo. No. 1:17‑cv‑02097‑RBJ (Judge R. Brooke Jackson). The defendants‑appellees were represented by Fish & Richardson P.C. as lead appellate counsel, with Wheeler Trigg O'Donnell LLP of Denver as local/trial co‑counsel and DISH in‑house counsel supervising.

Two threshold flags before the names:

1. The appeal is over the '610 patent, not the '442 patent. The § 101 summary‑judgment ruling affirmed in No. 21‑2268 concerned U.S. Patent 8,867,610. The '442 patent appears in the same consolidated Colorado action (it was asserted against ARRIS Solutions and was the subject of ARRIS's IPR2019‑01222), which is presumably why Google Patents' litigation table associates No. 21‑2268 with the '442. The '442 was never part of the DISH appellate record in 21‑2268.
2. No. 21‑2268 is no longer pending. It was affirmed under Fed. Cir. R. 36 on May 11, 2023. (A later, separate appeal, No. 23‑1035, addressed the district court's § 285 fee award to DISH and resulted in vacatur/remand.)

Also note: ARRIS Solutions, Inc., a co‑defendant below, was dismissed after settlement in March 2021 and is not a party to No. 21‑2268; I found no ARRIS appellate counsel appearance, and I will not guess at ARRIS's trial counsel.

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Counsel of record for Defendants‑Appellees (Sling TV L.L.C., Sling Media L.L.C., DISH Network L.L.C., DISH Technologies L.L.C.)

Supporting WTO timekeeping shows one partner (Gottschalk), one associate, and one paralegal (Sharon A. Gottesfeld) from that firm — a small, trial‑focused role relative to F&R's ~$4.97M in billed fees.

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Sourcing

• Rule 36 judgment, No. 2021‑2268 (Fed. Cir. May 11, 2023) — full caption, district‑court origin (1:17‑cv‑02097‑RBJ), and counsel listing: "ADAM SHARTZER, Fish & Richardson P.C., Washington, DC, argued for defendants‑appellees. Also represented by MICHAEL JOHN BALLANCO, RUFFIN B. CORDELL, BRIAN JAMES LIVEDALEN." (patentcasewatch.com)
• D. Colo. ECF 308‑3 (Aug. 13, 2021) — Gottschalk affidavit: WTO retained mid‑April 2021 as co‑counsel for Sling TV, Sling Media, DISH Network and DISH Technologies; Denver address and credentials.
• D. Colo. ECF 308 (fee exhibits) — identifies "RUFFIN B. CORDELL and BRIAN J. LIVEDALEN and ADAM R. SHARTZER, Fish & Richardson, PC, 901 15th St. NW, Ste. 700, Washington, DC 20005" as counsel for the DISH/Sling defendants; ECF 308‑4/308‑5 show Katzin as DISH in‑house contact and the Feb. 11, 2021 notice letter from F&R.
• D. Colo. Dkt. 103 (June 4, 2018) — Graubart/Bright F&R Atlanta signatures on the ARRIS substitution stipulation.
• Fed. Cir. No. 23‑1035, Doc. 56‑1 — appellees' counsel block naming Fish & Richardson and "Wheeler, Trigg, O'Donnell: Hugh Q. Gottshalk"; signature "/s/ Ruffin B. Cordell, Counsel for Sling TV L.L.C., Sling Media L.L.C., DISH Network L.L.C., …"
• EchoStar/DISH SEC disclosures — procedural history confirming Arris's March 2021 dismissal and the July 30/31, 2021 summary judgment on the '610 patent.

Caveats: PACER was not queried directly; the Federal Circuit docket sheet itself (entries/appearance forms) was not retrieved, so I cannot confirm whether any additional F&R associate entered a formal appearance at the CAFC beyond those named in the Rule 36 judgment. Office locations for Ballanco are unverified. Nothing indicates any filing under seal affecting the identity of counsel.