Patent Law

The following is excerpted from a February 9, 2010 PR Newswire release found at U.S. Politics Today:

Hunton & Williams LLP and DiNovo Price Ellwanger & Hardy LLP filed a patent infringement suit on behalf of client TecSec, Incorporated against several of the world's leading technology companies. The defendants include IBM, SAS Institute, SAP, Cisco, SUN Microsystems, Sybase, Software AG, Adobe, eBay, PayPal, and Oracle. The suit was filed on Friday, February 5, 2010, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

The complaint includes allegations of infringement of 11 U.S. patents issued to TecSec covering core encryption technology used by the defendants' customers to protect valuable commercial data, such as credit card information, health care information, and other information companies are required by law to secure. The complaint alleges the defendants have earned billions of dollars of revenue through the unauthorized use of TecSec's patented encryption technology in the manufacture and sale of numerous database management systems, application servers, and processing systems. These include IBM's DB2 and WebSphere Application Server; Oracle's Application Server and Oracle Database system; and SUN's UltraSPARC processors. In addition to seeking damages, the suit asks the court to permanently bar the defendants from selling any products using TecSec's patented technology.

TecSec sued Microsoft last year alleging infringement of some of the same patents involved in the complaint just filed. The parties settled in September 2009.

Read the full release here.