Columbia Uni lands $481m in cybersecurity patent case
Wilful infringement verdict sees software giant pay 2.6 times original award | Law firm Quinn Emanuel held in contempt for making false statements about a witness | Judge orders Columbia professors be added a co-inventors.
A software company has been ordered to pay New York's Columbia University enhanced damages of nearly $481.3 million—2.6 times the original amount an earlier verdict had granted.
Gen Digital, formerly known as NortonLifeLock and Symantec, was ordered in a revised special verdict in May 2022 to pay almost $185 million to Columbia for patent infringement concerning a clutch of cybersecurity technology patents.
But after Columbia requested enhanced damages due to alleged wilful infringement—as well as misconduct on the part of both Gen Digital and their representative law firm Quinn Emanuel—the dispute was brought to a close in a Virginia federal court on September 30.
Contempt of court
The jury last year found that Norton, whose anti-malware products include Norton, Avast, and AVG, had “wilfully infringed” Columbia’s patents emerging from research and innovation conducted by Columbia professors and researchers in the university’s Intrusion Detection Systems Laboratory.
The jury also found Quinn Emanuel to be in contempt of court after failing to comply with a court order to disclose communications from a Gen Digital witness.
Columbia accused the software company and Quinn Emanuel of making false statements about the willingness of former Gen Digital executive Marc Dacier to testify, after he had told the university information to the contrary.
The jury also ruled that, as per Columbia’s 2013 complaint, two of the university’s professors should be listed as inventors on a Norton-owned patent related to decoy technology for virus detection.
Columbia said it had disclosed research about the technology during collaborations with Norton on government grant proposals, and that Norton had used the information to apply for the patent.
A ten-year dispute
Columbia first sued Gen Digital in 2013, then known as Symantec, accusing the company of infringing six patents related to intrusion-detection systems.
Among its claims was that Symantec filed its own patent applications on Columbia’s technology without listing the university’s researchers as inventors.
“Symantec not only concealed this fact from Columbia, but misled Columbia into believing that Symantec would not file its own patent applications on Columbia’s technology,” said the plaintiff in its 2013 complaint.
Columbia also claimed that Symantec had asked the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) not to publish a patent application as would ordinarily occur, to “prevent Columbia from discovering the truth”.
Final judgment
The original six patents in dispute were whittled down to three last year: US patents 8,704,115, 8,601,322 (both titled “Methods, Media And Systems For Detecting Anomalous Program Executions”); and 8,549,643 (titled “Using decoys by a data loss prevention system to protect against unscripted activity”).
The five-page final judgment was delivered by US District Judge Hannah Lauck in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Richmond Division.
Lauck found that Gen Digital, referred to as Norton in the final judgment, had directly and indirectly infringed the ’322 and ’115 patents.
She also ruled that Professor Salvatore Stolfo and Professor Angelos Keromytis of Columbia were joint inventors of the ’643 patent, as well as Darren Shou, a former researcher with NortonLifeLock.
In a statement, Quinn Emanuel said that it "respectfully disagrees with the district court’s finding and will be making our legal response in due course.”
WIPR has contacted Gen Digital for comment, without immediate response.
