Monday, February 17, 2014

LinkedIn and Parallel Iron Reach Settlement, Ending Patent Disputes

Case Filed: Jul 12, 2012

Case Closed: Feb 12, 2014

Court: Delaware District Court

Judge: Richard G. Andrews

Case Summary:
Parallel Iron, a shell company incorporated in Delaware has filed over 25 lawsuits against tech companies including LinkedIn, claiming their Hadoop installations infringe on three of its patents. The patents in question were:
  •        US7197662 issued on Mar 27, 2007
  •        US7543177 issued on Jun 02, 2009
  •        US7958388 issued on Jun 07, 2011

All the patents are entitled ‘Methods and systems for a storage system’ and expire[i] by Oct 31, 2022. Parallel iron is the current assignee[ii] of the patents (source: MaxVal’s Assignment Database). The patents in general describe ways of storing massive amounts of information across multiple memory devices that allow a storage system to track the information and quickly retrieve it, even when a memory device fails.

In the suit against LinkedIn, plaintiff alleged that defendant manufactures products and/or services implementing Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), which is designed to store very large data sets and to stream those data sets at high bandwidth to user applications as claimed in the ‘662, ‘177 and ‘388 patents. As a result of the defendant’s infringement of the patents, Parallel Iron sought royalty together with interest and costs as fixed by the Court.

The case is concluded as the parties entered into a ‘settlement agreement’ and filed a stipulated motion for dismissal.  Upon consideration, the Court granted and ordered all claims dismissed with prejudice and counterclaims dismissed without prejudice subject to the terms of agreement. Each party will incur their own costs. Further details of the settlement were not disclosed. Most of the other cases filed by Parallel Iron over Hadoop system have been settled.

See 1:12-cv-00877 or more details. To get alerts on cases filed/closed, subscribe to our Litigation Alerts.

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[i] Expected expiration date. Patent Term Estimator is a free web-based tool that automatically calculates patent terms and expiration dates for U.S. utility patents.
[ii] MaxVal offers Patent Assignment Alert service where subscribers receive email alerts when assignments relating to target applications, patents or entities of interest are recorded.

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