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27 April 2015Patents

IV anti-virus patents lack an ‘inventive concept’, US court rules

A US court has said that two patents previously asserted by licensing company Intellectual Ventures (IV) against four anti-virus businesses do not cover patent-eligible subject matter.

The decision, on Wednesday (April 22), came after Japan-based Trend Micro requested that the US District Court for the District of Delaware review the validity of three patents that IV asserted against it and others.

At the centre of the dispute are US patent numbers 6,460,050; 6,073,142; and 5,987,610, which all cover anti-virus software.

In a lawsuit filed in 2010, IV asserted the patents against Trend Micro, Symantec, McAfee and Check Point. The cases were split and heard separately.

In February this year, Symantec was found to have infringed the ‘142 and ‘610 patents but was cleared of infringing the ‘050 patent, and ordered to pay $17 million in damages. McAfee and Check Point had both settled with IV in 2012 and 2013 respectively, although the terms of the settlements were not disclosed.

However, the case against Trend Micro had not yet been decided.

Now, according to the court, both the ‘142 patent, which covers a system that enables businesses to implement an anti-virus detection system across multiple e-mail accounts, and the ‘050 patent, which identifies and classifies files received by a computer, do not cover patent eligible subject matter.

The court agreed with Trend Micro’s claims that the patents do not cover the necessary “ inventive concept” in order to be valid.

But Stark rejected Trend Micro’s claims that the ‘610 patent did not cover patentable subject matter.

According to the court documents, however, despite the ruling that the ‘610 patent is valid, IV told both the court and Trend Micro that it will not follow up its infringement claim related to that patent.

After the decision Symantec, which had previously been found liable for infringement, told WIPR it was “considering its options”.

The case against Trend Micro was set to be heard next month.

Neither Micro Trend nor IV responded to a request for comment.

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