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CNET sued Etilize for patent infringement; the court granted in part and denied in part Etilize's motion for summary judgment of non-infringement.

CNET holds the '933 and '426 patents, which claim methods and systems for automatically creating an electronic catalog of product information gathered from various websites. CNET provides customers with a central shopping portal from which they can search for product information and purchase products from a variety of vendors. Customers pay Etilize for a subscription service called "SpeX," which gives them the right to access and use the Etilize catalog. All of the product information contained in the Etilize catalog is collected by Etilize-Pakistan, a separate Pakistani corporation. Etilize owns the catalog, but Etilize-Pakistan performs the work to collect the information.

Etilize moved for summary judgment of non-infringement on two grounds: 1) neither it nor its customers "used" the claimed systems within the United States; and 2) the catalog was not a product within the meaning of 35 U.S.C. §271(g). As to Etilize's first argument, the system claims were for aggregating product information and creating a product catalog, both of which had been completed at the time the customer downloaded and used the catalog. Customers used the result of the system (the product catalog), not the system itself. Because Etilize's customers did not use the claimed system, the customers could not directly infringe the system. Accordingly, Etilize did not induce its customers to infringe by making the subscription service available and by providing user names and passwords that allowed access to the catalog. Further, because Etilize-Pakistan did not use the system within the United States, it did not directly infringe the system. The product information was aggregated, assembled, and organized in Pakistan. The situs of the use of the system as a whole was Pakistan. Neither was the court convinced that Etilize directly infringed, as use of the catalog was not use of the system itself. Regarding Etilize's second argument, the court concluded that the catalog was in fact an object that was present in the United States because the file was downloaded onto the local hard drives of computers owned by customers in the United States.