SAN FRANCISCO — After five years of fractured decisions and a reversal by the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit finally joined hands and sang “Kumbaya” Thursday on the law of divided patent infringement.

All nine judges hearing Akamai Technologies v. Limelight Networks agreed that a jury properly held Limelight liable for directly infringing Akamai's method of operating a content delivery network, even though Limelight's customers perform part of the method.

The upshot is that patent holders now have stronger grounds for bringing claims when service providers and their customers jointly infringe a patent—a not uncommon scenario, said Fenwick & West partner Darren Donnelly. “It's more a fine-tuning of the law than the large sea changes we've seen” from past decisions in the case, said Donnelly.