Patent Law

The following is excerpted from Thomas Claburn's February 6, 2008 article at InformationWeek:

Barracuda Networks, a maker of e-mail and Web security hardware, has sent out a distress call to the open source community to save it from patent litigation at the hands of Trend Micro, a competing security company. On Tuesday it asked for help from anyone who can provide information that can invalidate Trend Micro's patent on gateway antivirus scanning.

Barracuda Networks has framed the dispute as an attack not only on itself but on the open source community and the free Clam AntiVirus software by "commercial patent holders attempting to unjustly hinder the free and open source community," as Dean Drako, president and CEO of Barracuda Networks, put it in a statement issued on Tuesday.

The patent in question, U.S. Patent No. 5,623,600, was filed in 1995. Fortinet, another security hardware vendor, was accused of violating the patent in 2004 and settled with Trend Micro in early 2006. Sweeny from Trend Micro confirmed that both Symantec (NSDQ: SYMC) and McAfee have licensed the patent as well.

"They're accusing us of importing open source software," said Drako. "How can you accuse someone of importing open source software? It's written everywhere." Nonetheless, Trend Micro appears to be doing just that it. If it prevails, Drako predicts trouble for companies that rely on open source software. "If Trend Micro is successful in claiming that we import Clam AV, and therefore that the ITC is the appropriate court, I could go claim that Linux is imported by IBM (NYSE: IBM) ... I could start suing them in the ITC. It could reinvent how patent litigation is done for open source software. It's a pretty bold move."

Read the full article here.