In Source Search Technologies v. LendingTree, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ("CAFC") vacated the United States District Court of New Jersey's grant of summary judgment that U.S. Patent No. 5,758,328 ("the '328 patent"), a system for matching buyers and vendors over a network like the internet, was infringed but invalid. The CAFC affirmed the grant of summary judgment for the findings that the claims were not indefinite and that LendingTree's website offered "goods and services" as contemplated by the '328 patent but remanded the case for further fact finding on the infringement and validity issues.

Source Search Technologies ("SST"), is the assignee of the '328 patent, which addressed the problem of returning too many or too few results in response to a user search query for goods or services. Claim 14, which was dependent on claims 12-13, limited the invention to a set of search results that was filtered by information supplied by buyers and vendors to improve the quality of the results. Significantly, the trial court interpreted the buyer's "request for quotation" as meaning buyers expected the system to return an offer capable of acceptance.

LendingTree operates a website for matching loan applicants with potential lenders. However, the system only returned a list of potential lenders to the applicant, leaving applicants and lenders to further negotiate the terms of any loan agreement without further involvement from LendingTree. SST sued LendingTree in 2006 for infringing the '328 patent. Both parties appealed the District Court's decision.

First, the CAFC evaluated the grant of summary judgment finding that the '328 patent was obvious under 35 U.S.C. 103 in light of the prior art, which included both e-commerce and bricks and mortar vendor search systems. The CAFC found that none of the prior art systems returned an offer capable of acceptance to the user, which was a limitation of the invention it construed from the language of Claim 14. All the prior art relied on further action by buyers or vendors to create a binding offer, as did LendingTree's system, which required additional steps such as credit checks. Whether a person of ordinary skill in the art would find the '328 invention easy or obvious needed further fact finding, which precluded a grant of summary judgment.

Next, the CAFC also vacated the grant of summary judgment on the issue of infringement. LendingTree challenged it on grounds that it did not provide "goods and services" or a "request for quotation" as required by Claims 12-14. The CAFC affirmed on the "goods and services" issue, finding that loan procural activities were specifically contemplated by the '328 patent. However, the CAFC vacated summary judgment for the "request for quotation" and remanded for further proceedings because it was arguable whether LendingTree's system-generated responses could be considered as binding offers as necessary to constitute infringement.

Finally, the CAFC affirmed the finding that the claims were not indefinite. LendingTree argued that "goods and services" was insolubly ambiguous, but the CAFC held that once a market was defined for the system a person of ordinary skill in the art could then easily determine what standard goods and services related to the market.

Therefore, the CAFC vacated the grants of summary judgment on the issues of invalidity and infringement, but affirmed the finding that LendingTree offered goods and services and that the claims were not indefinite. It remanded the case back to the District Court to resolve the material issues of fact relating to invalidity and infringement.