back to article Pure swats away EMC patent punch, mulls $14m verdict appeal

Pure Storage has been given a mild slap on the wrist for infringing part of an EMC-owned patent describing deduplication. Mountain View-based Pure was accused of trampling over five EMC patents covering dedupe and RAID technology back in November 2013. The dispute went to a Delaware district court, and then to a jury trial …

  1. Nate Amsden

    would be nice

    to have an english translation of whatever the patent in question covers. Raw patent text itself is usually unreadable to me anyway.

    1. diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: would be nice

      "to have an english translation"

      I think part of the problem is that these are deliberately written to obfuscate or overcomplicate designs. A good number of patents boil down to nothing. But we'll take a look.

      C.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: would be nice

        "I think part of the problem is that these are deliberately written to obfuscate or overcomplicate designs. A good number of patents boil down to nothing. But we'll take a look."

        True. You need a war chest of patents to be a tech player. The patent system is broken. It's purpose is to incentive people to come up with new ideas, but it works to protect incumbents against original ideas. Look at some of the odd ball stuff that has happened. Google bought a bunch of patents off of IBM (I wouldn't be surprised if some of them were IBM relational database patents for their run in with Oracle). Google has no intention of using those patents to build anything. They are just there to ward off the trolls and to threaten a counter-suit if anyone, maybe Oracle, decides to sue them.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: would be nice

      It appears to be the patent for inline deduplication (using in-memory fingerprinting/hashing), that EMC inherited from the Data Domain acquisition.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Most of these lawsuits over common industry standard processes are just ridic. If the patent system was this loose 35 years ago, IBM could have sued EMC and everyone else out of business.

  3. dpk

    Clearly the courts don't agree with most of these comments. Vendors should be able to protect the investments they made in developing a patent.

    1. Dave Hilling

      Yeah but

      Since there is almost a zero percent chance the source code is the same one could argue that just because it operates in vaguely the same way that the design is obvious and common sense for the field and get EMC's patent invalidated or argue that since it is not implemented in exactly the way that is described a more friendly court may also dismiss the claim.

    2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Patents or patterns?

      "Vendors should be able to protect the investments they made in developing a patent."

      One of the big topics in S/W development has been the idea of patterns. It goes back to research showing that S/W developers, working independently, would come up with similar solutions to similar problems.

      It follows that the bar for originality or lack of obviousness in S/W patents (assuming such a thing should be allowed at all) ought to be raised sufficiently high to allow for this. There should be a requirement to demonstrate that, given the problem, a developer skilled in the art would not come up with a similar solution. The only test I can think of to demonstrate such originality would be to show that the problem has been well known for some time without solution. An example might be hypertext, an idea had been around for decades before TB-L came up with HTTP.

      In the absence of such a demonstration one should not rule out the possibility that Pure developed their software with no less investment than EMC and, by your own arguments, ought to be similarly protected. If, of course, the allegation had been that they'd simply copied EMC's code the case could have been fought on the surer ground of copyright.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Article from el reg last year.

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/19/pure_purchases_patents/

    Looks like they 'armoured up' early by buying patents from IBM. Just goes to show how ridiculous the whole patent market is. Read about this kinda stuff all the time with the larger players in *any* industry doing this to anyone new player who threatens their business.

    Also bit shameful filing in Delaware....it's not Texas but it's the next best thing.

  5. Stephen McLaughlin

    Legal Fees will outweigh the Verdict

    The only ones making any money here are the legal teams.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    nothing to see here

    EMC drops 2 patents before the case starts, judge throws 2 out and 1 patent win.

    Nothing to see here other than noting that EMC went for 80 mil and got 14 mil. no future royalties and the software that was deemed to infringe has been ready to be replaced in their software.

    EMC touting this as a historic win. I guess EMC is screaming for revenue any way it can get it.

    http://www.businessinsider.com.au/emc-exec-email-cites-blackberry-moment-2016-3?r=US&IR=T suggests that EMC have more pressing things to be worrying about

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