Kaspersky Lab Defeats Patent Troll

The public documents in this case are heavily redacted, because the relevant underlying facts involve confidential or sensitive information about licensing agreements. That, plus my unfamiliarity with the underlying technology, makes it tough for me to put together a complete picture of how this litigation actually unfolded. But, as best as I can tell from a brief initial review of the papers:

The Troll was alleging many different "flavors" of infringement that broadly fall into two categories: direct and indirect. Direct infringement would be if Kaspersky itself were violating the patent, for example by using patented software itself. Indirect infringement would be if Kaspersky were inducing others to violate the patent, for example by selling patented software to customers.

Kaspersky moved for summary judgment, which is essentially asking the Court to rule in your favor without a trial because the evidence is so overwhelmingly in your favor that no reasonable jury could find against you and a trial would just be a waste of time.

Kaspersky successfully argued that it wasn't directly infringing on the patents because the patents described a method for having a computer carry out some process, and in order to infringe, Kaspersky would have had to actually carry out that process, rather than selling software that carried out that process.

Kaspersky successfully argued that it wasn't indirectly infringing on the patent because all of its customers were covered by preexisting license agreements. Unfortunately, the key facts on this claim are redacted.

The Court granted summary judgment to Kaspersky on these grounds on most of the Troll's claims, but there were a few remaining claims that fell outside of Kaspersky's arguments. (These seemingly related to specific manipulations of computer hardware? Not really sure, don't understand the technology and don't want to learn it, already wasting too much time on this LOL)

After the Court granted summary judgment, the Federal Circuit handed down some new case law that was directly on-point. This new law made it clear that Kaspersky was going to win on those few claims that survived through summary judgment.

Kaspersky moved for reconsideration, essentially asking the Court to consider this new case and revise the original summary judgment order to dispose of the rest of the claims as well. Unfortunately, there are some fairly strict timing rules involved in moving for reconsideration and Kaspersky didn't comply with them, so it wasn't able to win this motion.

However, the writing was on the wall at this point, and the Troll apparently realized there was no way it could win at trial. On June 15, the Troll voluntarily dismissed the rest of the claims, effectively giving up and going home.

Congrats on reading this far. Happy to try to answer questions if you have any. Others who might know more about the case should jump in and supplement or correct me if I missed or misunderstood anything.

e: Responsive to the original parent comment in this thread:

1. Given that the Troll voluntarily dismissed its claims - essentially conceding defeat - I would be surprised if the Troll appealed. However, there might be some grounds for appeal in earlier nondispositive motions relating to interpretation of the patent claims.

2. Kaspersky won on noninfringement grounds, but they structured their noninfringement argument in a very elegant and powerful way that essentially renders the patent-in-suit toothless while still technically valid. This isn't legal advice and everyone knows it would be idiotic to rely on a HN posting in making any decisions with potential legal consequences, but I personally would go ahead and "scratch this patent off our lists." One down, several hundred thousand to go...

Seems consistent with what we're seeing in this case. Very hard to imagine any VC greenlighting this sort of "it's the principle" litigation; very easy to imagine a founder doing so.

It's well known that he is the largest Shareholder.

It'd be very interesting if legal teams from different companies banded together to fight a common foe. I'm surprised this doesn't happen (or maybe it does and we don't hear about it?)

If I was a defendant along with 10 other companies in a case like this, you can bet I'd be calling them up to start a friendly dialog about sharing resources and discovery results (whether they were competitors or not).

I can imagine that for larger legal teams, like Microsoft probably has, they have very strict procedures dealing with this sort of suit, making collaboration with other teams difficult. I don't know anyone on MS' legal team, so this is speculation ;).