Internet Archive, Wikimedia withdraw software patent suits
The Internet Archive and the non-profit behind Wikipedia have withdrawn their lawsuits against a software company who accused them of patent infringement.
Wikimedia Foundation and the Internet Archive both filed separate complaints in California in March, seeking a declaration that they had not infringed patents covering predictive text technology owned by WordLogic.
Both companies have now filed motions to voluntarily dismiss their complaints with prejudice at the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
This means the claims cannot be revived in court again.
The two non-profits filed the complaints after receiving notices of infringement from WordLogic earlier this year, which also raised the threat of litigation if the alleged infringement was not resolved.
They also claimed that the patents were invalid over prior art in the first place, and should be cancelled.
In the complaint, both non-profits cited the US Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s decision to institute inter partes review (IPR) of the WordLogic patents, based on a “reasonable likelihood that the claims were unpatentable”.
Those IPR proceedings were terminated in April 2018 after the petitioner, Unified Patents, agreed to settle with WordLogic.
The Internet Archive has faced other, more high-profile legal proceedings related to IP this year, after it was sued by publishers over its ‘emergency COVID-19 library’.
The non-profit unveiled the library as countries began to enter COVID-19 lockdown. As part of the project, it expanded access to 1.4 million digitised works.
Publishers including Penguin Random House and Harper Collins sued the Internet Archive, claiming the library was akin to “industrial scale piracy”.
The Internet Archive decided to end its emergency library last month, but hit out at the publishers for attacking the “concept of any library owning and lending digital books, challenging the very idea of what a library is in the digital world”.
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