In-House Counsel

Just one more thing.

By legalthing

I promise, I do have other subjects to write about; however, immediately after my last blog we received some additional news of interest concerning the NetApp litigation.

After NetApp filed its lawsuit to halt adoption of Sun's open source ZFS technology, we responded by filing reexamination requests with the PTO citing the extensive amount of highly relevant prior art that was not disclosed or considered when NetApp originally filed its patents. The patent office clearly agreed with the relevance of this prior art, as demonstrated by its rejection of the claims across all of the reexaminations. Of these patents, three have been described by NetApp as "core" (US Patent Nos. 6,857,001; 6,892,211; and 5,819,292). Here's the current status of each of them:

NetApp Patent No. 6,857,001 - The PTO rejected all 63 claims of the patent based on 10 prior art references provided by Sun. In addition, the trial court has agreed to remove that patent from the litigation for now pending the final reexamination by the PTO.

NetApp Patent No. 6,892,211 - The PTO rejected all 24 claims of the patent based on 12 prior art references provided by Sun. There is currently a request pending before the trial judge to stay this patent from the litigation as well.

NetApp Patent No. 5,819,292 - And late last week, we were informed that the PTO has rejected all of the asserted claims of this patent relying on at least two separate prior art references out of the many provided by Sun. (The examiner felt that to consider the other references would be "redundant".)

Some may recall that the '292 ("WAFL" technology) patent was what NetApp's founder, David Hitz, originally highlighted on his blog as being innovative and infringed by ZFS. However, what this litigation is proving is what we have known all along - ZFS is a fundamentally different, game changing technology.

It's the same thing we hear from our customers.

Full post as published by The Legal Thing... on October 06, 2008 (boomark / email).