Pure Storage Wins New Trial in EMC Patent Case
03 September 2016 - 6:25AM
Dow Jones News
By Don Clark
A federal judge set aside a $14 million jury verdict against
Pure Storage Inc. in a lawsuit brought by EMC Corp., ordering a new
trial to determine whether a key patent at issue is the case is
valid.
The jury in U.S. District Court in Delaware found in March that
Pure had infringed one of three patents at issue in the case
brought by EMC in 2013. U.S. District Judge Richard Andrews on
Thursday granted Pure's motion for a new trial to settle whether
the patent is invalid because some of its claimed inventions had
been disclosed in another company's patent.
EMC and Pure are fierce rivals in the market for data-storage
hardware. Pure, which went public last year, helped pioneer a new
segment of the market that uses chips called flash memory instead
of disk drives to store data.
EMC, which is set to be acquired next week by Dell Inc., was
originally known for disk-based systems. But the company is now a
major supplier of systems using flash technology as well.
An EMC spokesman declined to comment on the judge's ruling.
Joe FitzGerald, Pure's general counsel, said he was pleased with
the decision. "We continue to believe that we will ultimately
prevail in the patent infringement case -- and today's ruling is a
major step in that direction," he wrote in a blog post
Thursday.
Pure shares rose 2% Friday to $11.92. EMC shares declined 0.3%
to $28.77.
The jury in March ruled that Pure had infringed one of the three
patents in EMC's case, associated with a technology called
deduplication that saves space in storage systems by eliminating
redundant data.
Pure argued the EMC patent was invalid because some of its
inventions had been disclosed in a patent issued in 2002 to Sun
Microsystems Inc., which was later purchased by Oracle Corp. The
jury concluded EMC's patent claims predated the Sun patent.
Judge Andrews concluded the jury erred in that conclusion
because it relied on documentation provided by inventors of the EMC
patent rather than independent evidence. He ruled the Sun patent
should be deemed to precede the EMC patent.
"The jury should have been instructed that the Sun patent is
prior art," he wrote.
The judge denied Pure's request for a judgment that the EMC
patent is invalid, a matter he ruled should be settled by another
jury. EMC had asked for a permanent injunction to stop Pure from
shipping infringing products, a request the judge said is now
moot.
Pure's Mr. FitzGerald said the company has now introduced
different deduplication software so that its current hardware no
longer uses the technology at issue in the case.
Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
September 02, 2016 16:10 ET (20:10 GMT)
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