Trend Micro Vindicated in U.S. District Court Ruling on Patent Infringement Claims by Intellectual Ventures

Trend Micro announced Wednesday that Judge Leonard Stark for the U.S. District Court of Delaware invalidated two Intellectual Ventures patents that have been asserted against Trend Micro since 2010. Judge Stark ruled that the patents were too abstract and not patent eligible. Trend Micro applauds the court’s decision which voids the need for a trial in early May.

“At Trend Micro, we recognize how important patent rights are for companies who invest millions of dollars in research and development, in addition to the human capital required to create innovative products in a competitive industry like software security,” said Eva Chen, CEO, Trend Micro. “We respect the judge’s decision that patents should protect new, original thinking and generic or abstract ideas do not become patentable merely because they are embodied in software. This validation is positive for our entire industry.”

Intellectual Ventures sued Trend Micro in 2010, seeking $150 million for its alleged infringement of U.S. Patents 6,460,050 (‘050) and 6,073,142 (‘142), along with two other patents that are no longer being asserted against Trend Micro. The ‘050 patent concerns generation of a digital identifier for email messages through a method of filtering. The ‘142 patent describes an “automated post office” which allows for the analyzing and filtering of vetted emails recognized to be unsafe.

Business Wire

U.S. judge cancels patents on eve of Trend Micro trial

A U.S. judge has invalidated two patents owned by Intellectual Ventures just weeks before its lawsuit against Japanese security software provider Trend Micro Inc over the same patents was set to go to trial. U.S. District Judge Leonard Stark in Delaware said on Wednesday the two patents were too abstract to deserve legal protection. The ruling likely means Intellectual Ventures' infringement trial with Trend Micro will not proceed.

Reuters

Software Patent Searching Doesn't Scale

Nathan Myhrvold, the Microsoft veteran who founded the patent-trolling giant Intellectual Ventures, is right that patent infringement is rampant among software firms. But in demanding that this infringement stop, Myhrvold isn't just declaring war on what he regards as Silicon Valley's patent-hostile culture. He's declaring war on the laws of mathematics. The legal research required for all software-producing firms to stop infringing patents would cost more than the entire revenue of the software industry. Even if firms were willing to pay the bill, there simply aren't enough patent lawyers to do the work. Firms infringe software patents because they don't have any other choice. [...] Why is software different from real estate? In a new paper, we argue the fundamental difference is a matter of scalability: how much effort it takes to discover who owns an invention—or a piece of land—as the number of patents or land parcels increases. Property rights in land scale well because parcels exist in relatively well-defined locations on a two-dimensional plane. County officials take advantage of this fact to store records in a predictable order (or, more recently, to build databases searchable by geographical location). Geographical locations serve as an "index" for real property claims, so record-keepers can find any specific file quickly no matter how many files there are.
From Ars Technica