Case Overview: Akamai Technologies, Inc. v. MediaPointe, Inc.

12.29.25

Akamai Technologies, Inc. v. MediaPointe, Inc., No. 2024-1571 (Fed. Cir. Nov. 25, 2025) offers a reminder that terms of degree in patent claims should be supported by objective boundaries in the intrinsic record. The dispute centered on MediaPointe’s U.S. Patent Nos. 8,559,426 and 9,426,195, which describe an “intelligent distribution network” for routing streamed media across the Internet. Akamai sought a declaratory judgment of noninfringement, and MediaPointe counterclaimed for infringement. During claim construction, Akamai challenged the patents’ repeated recitations of “optimal,” “best,” and “best performing” nodes and routes as rendering the claims indefinite. The district court agreed and entered judgment of invalidity, which the Federal Circuit affirmed.

On appeal, the Federal Circuit emphasized that while terms of degree are not inherently improper, they must be supported by “objective boundaries” discernible to a skilled artisan. In the record of this dispute, the intrinsic record weighed against MediaPointe. Although the claims required the mapping of trace routes and the specification referenced measurable factors such as latency, hop count, and reliability, the Federal Circuit found those disclosures insufficient because the patents did not provide a rule, hierarchy, or methodology for determining what actually makes a route “optimal” or a node “best.” The specification further contemplated reliance on an open-ended set of additional considerations—including bandwidth, historical performance, cost, and even “time of day”—without guidance on how such factors should be weighed or reconciled.

Building on that deficiency, the court explained that the absence of any guiding framework had implications for claim scope. Because the disclosed metrics could be applied in different ways and could yield different routing outcomes under the same conditions, the claims permitted multiple, equally plausible determinations of what constituted a “best” or “optimal” route. The intrinsic record did not indicate whether one outcome should prevail over another when such divergences arose, leaving the choice among competing results unconstrained. In that circumstance, the court concluded, the claims did not adequately inform skilled artisans with reasonable certainty as to their scope, consistent with Nautilus and Interval Licensing.

In sum, this decision underscores the importance of providing objective guidance for terms of degree when patentees rely on those terms of degree, guidance which the Federal Circuit concluded was not missing in the MediaPointe’s patents.

Samuel Raque | Associate Attorney