Cloud Cycle v Verifi [2024] EWHC 2001 (Ch)

6 August 2024

James Abrahams KC and Edmund Eustace appeared for the Defendants (“Verifi”) in a patent dispute relating to the Claimant’s (“Cloud Cycle’s”) system for monitoring a property of concrete (known as ‘slump’) in a mixing truck, and its alleged infringement of one of Verifi’s patents (“EP689”). Unusually, the validity of EP689 was not in issue, and Verifi only alleged infringement under the doctrine of equivalents. Most of the argument at trial addressed the proper characterisation of the inventive concept of EP689.

The patented method for measuring slump involved taking measurements of the rotational speed and torque of the concrete mixing drum. The measurements were sequentially stored and erased until the values remained stable over a full rotation, and then compared against a look-up table of predetermined values to calculate the slump. Cloud Cycle’s system also measured speed and torque, but with measurements taken continuously and averaged over a sliding 20 second window. These were uploaded to an online ‘slump prediction model’ which determined slump using a linear regression.

The judge held that the inventive concept of claim 1 of EP689 was to calculate slump at different values of speed and pressure (compared to the CGK approach of measuring pressure at a known speed), but this required the measured values to remain stable for long enough to perform a calculation. By contrast, the data collected in Cloud Cycle’s system was used regardless of whether, or how long, the measurements remained stable. The judge therefore held that Cloud Cycle’s system did not achieve substantially the same result in substantially the same way as the inventive concept of claim 1 of EP689, as required by the Actavis test, and therefore did not infringe the patent.

View judgment