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10 August 2015Patents

Blue Coat fined $40m for infringing Finjan’s web security patents

A US court has awarded patent licensing company Finjan $40 million in damages after a jury ruled that web security company Blue Coat Systems infringed five of its patents.

The US District Court for the Northern District of California entered the verdict after a jury ruled that five patents covering web security were infringed.

At the centre of the dispute were Blue Coat’s WebPulse, ProxySG, Content Analysis System, Malware Analysis Appliance and ProxyAG products.

Of the five patents that the jury found had been infringed, four were literally infringed. A fifth patent was infringed under the ‘doctrine of equivalents’.

The doctrine of equivalents is defined as when a company’s product is equivalent to what is covered by another party’s patent, but does not fall within its literal scope.

Blue Coat challenged the validity of the five patents on the grounds that they were anticipated, but the jury rejected these arguments.

In total, the jury awarded $39.5 million in damages to Finjan on August 4—with the bulk of the damages accounting for the literally infringed patents.

Julie Mar-Spinola, chief intellectual property officer at Finjan, said: “We are both grateful and gratified with the jury’s verdict. As we have stated ... we are committed to our licensing best practices and will present our patent infringement claims credibly and convincingly to establish the merits of our case, in and outside of the courtroom.

“Additionally, we were confident in the merits of our patent claim against Blue Coat. It is significant that the jury unanimously agreed with us on all but one,” she added.

Finjan is currently embroiled in patent disputes with other web security companies including Palo Alto Networks, Symantec, Proofpoint, FireEye and Sophos.

Web security patents were at the centre of a $17 million ruling issued in February in a case between licensing company Intellectual Ventures (IV) and Symantec. In that ruling, the US District Court for the District of Delaware found that Symantec infringed two of IV’s patents, but the $17 million awarded was significantly less than the $299 million IV had requested.

Blue Coat had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication, but we will update the story should the company get in touch.

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9 February 2015   A US court has awarded licensing company Intellectual Ventures $17 million in damages after finding that anti-virus software business Symantec infringed two of its patents.
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11 January 2018   Cyber security company Blue Coat Systems has been granted a judgment of non-infringement in a cyber security patent case.