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23 August 2018Patents

IBM licenses IoT patent as part of settlement

Technology multinational IBM has taken a licence to a patent at the centre of a dispute with a San Diego-based provider of security solutions in the internet of things (IoT).

ZitoVault, which had brought a patent infringement lawsuit at the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas (Dallas), announced the settlement on Tuesday, August 21.

The San Diego-based company sued IBM back in April this year, accusing it of infringing US patent number 6,484,257, which covers ZitoVault’s CryptoSale software. The patent covers systems and methods that “provide a scaleable way to maintain a number of cryptographic sessions”.

As part of the settlement, IBM will license the patent for use with its cloud-based services Softlayer.

IBM has granted ZitoVault a cross-licence agreement to US patent 9,053,446, called “Dynamically quantifying the demand of each software component of each software stack deployed in the cloud environment”.

According to ZitoVault, the combined patents along with its other patents will further enable ZitoVault to provide “global virtual distributed cloud computing security frameworks”.

Other aspects of the settlement and licence were not disclosed.

Tim McElwee, managing director of ZitoVault, said: “This successful resolution will allow ZitoVault to continue focusing on developing security platforms which provide secure endpoint, detection and response which are enabled by CryptoScale.”

ZitoVault filed to dismiss the case with prejudice earlier in August, and it was dismissed by the court soon after.

A spokesperson for IBM said: “This matter has been settled confidentially.”

In January 2018, WIPR  reported that in 2017 IBM was once again assigned the most patents in the US, according to rankings by IFI Claims.

Last year was the 25th year in a row that the company has topped the list of recipients of US patents. IBM’s total of 9,043 patents was triple the number it received a decade ago, and it means that IBM has acquired over 100,000 patents in the last 25 years.

A spokesperson for IBM said: “This matter has been settled confidentially.”

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