The order is Document 204 in VirtaMove, Corp. v. Google LLC, No. 5:25-cv-00860-NW (consolidated with No. 26-cv-00704), and Document 220 in VirtaMove, Corp. v. Amazon.com, Inc., No. 5:25-cv-10579-NW, both in the Northern District of California. It is one 27-page order entered in both related cases. Both cases were transferred from the Western District of Texas. The court held a technology tutorial and Markman hearing on October 1, 2026.
Patents and parties
VirtaMove asserts U.S. Patent 7,519,814 against Google and against Amazon.com, Inc., Amazon.com Services LLC, and Amazon Web Services, Inc., and U.S. Patent 7,774,762 against Google only. The '762 patent is a continuation in part of the application that became the '814 patent. The order says both patents relate to the management and deployment of software applications. It describes the '762 patent as directed to running an application on an incompatible platform by using files distributed with the operating system the application requires in place of the platform's local system files, and the '814 patent as directed to secure containers that hold applications together with the system files needed to run them.
The ruling on the '762 patent
The parties identified five terms as potentially case or claim dispositive. For claim 17 of the '762 patent, the court held "an incompatible computer platform in which the first software application is not intended to execute" indefinite on two grounds. On "incompatible," it adopted VirtaMove's original construction, a platform "in which the first software application cannot run without change," and found that construction contradicts the claim, which runs the unchanged application on that platform. It declined VirtaMove's revised wording as circular. On "not intended to execute," it accepted that the patentee used "intended" to mean "designed," but found the patent gives no objective parameters for assessing the application's design.
The court did not find claim 17 indefinite on the other two terms. It corrected "the second incompatible computer platform" by striking "second" as an obvious drafting error, and construed "the local operating system libraries" as referring to the operating system of the incompatible platform, with "libraries" given its plain meaning. It noted Google offered no expert testimony on that term.
The ruling on the '814 patent
For claim 1 of the '814 patent, all parties agreed the patentee defined "disparate computing environments" as "[e]nvironments where computers are stand-alone or where there are plural computers and where they are unrelated." The court found the "stand-alone" part of that definition contradictory or without objective boundaries, credited Amazon's unrebutted expert report, and held the term indefinite in both cases. It held asserted dependent claims 2, 4, 6 to 10, and 13 to 14 invalid with claim 1. It construed "an operating system's root file system" as "each of the operating systems' root file systems" of the claimed plurality of servers, rejecting Google's indefiniteness challenge to that term.
The court applied the same '814 construction in both cases even though Google did not submit an expert report, citing the importance of uniform treatment of a patent. It concluded that, because clear and convincing evidence showed two terms of claim 17 and one term of claim 1 indefinite, those claims and all claims depending on them are invalid. The order states that claims 17 to 20 of the '762 patent and claims 1 to 30 of the '814 patent are invalid for indefiniteness.
What happens next
The court directed VirtaMove and each defendant to meet and confer on next steps, citing a Western District of Texas case that entered final judgment after a claim construction order found all asserted claims invalid. It set a status conference in both cases for October 27, 2026 at 10:30 a.m.