HP and university settle differences over ‘revolutionary’ patents

A US university has settled a patent infringement dispute with technology company HP over “ground-breaking” technology.

In a notice filed at the US District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee on Thursday, October 19, the University of Tennessee said it and HP had resolved all the claims for relief stipulated in the complaint.

In its initial complaint, filed in May this year, the university said HP and others had infringed patents owned by its research foundation covering “fields of parallel processing and high performance database design”.

Throughout the 2000s, the technology developments and subsequent patents “revolutionised the scalability of modern-day database systems and were widely adopted in the market”, the complaint alleged.

The patents in suit, US numbers 8,099,733; 6,741,983; 7,272,612; and 7,882,106, were so “ground breaking” that they were cited in more than 300 patent applications, including by the defendants, as well as several others, the complaint added.

The university, which sought enhanced damages and attorneys’ fees, had said HP should be found to have engaged in infringement that is “wilful, wanton, malicious, bad-faith, deliberate, consciously wrongful, flagrant, or characteristic of a pirate”.

Financial details of the settlement have not been disclosed in the latest court filing announcing the settlement.

The notice added: “Plaintiffs and defendants, through their attorneys of record, hereby stipulate to the dismissal of all of plaintiffs’ claims for relief against defendants.”

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