The US firm Information Protection and Authentication of Texas (IPAT) has lost its suit for patent violation in an American court against Kaspersky Lab, a Moscow-based publisher of Internet security solutions.
In December 2008 IPAT filed a lawsuit in the Eastern District Court of Texas against a group of IT companies – including McAfee, Microsoft, AVG, Symantec and Kaspersky Lab – for alleged infringement of two patents that had been issued in the USA in 1994.
Kaspersky Lab was the only respondent to refuse pretrial settlement. The Russian company adopted a legal defense strategy it called “Kill the troll,” insisting on the invalidity of the patents and the absence of infringement by Kaspersky Lab.
A patent troll is a person or company who enforces patents against one or more alleged infringers in an opportunistic manner, with no intention of manufacturing or marketing the patented invention.
“This is not just some ordinary legal victory,” Kaspersky Lab founder Eugene Kaspersky wrote on his blog. “For a start, an IT company beat a US patent troll on its home turf, playing by the rules. Secondly, we were the only company out of a total of 35 that didn’t cave in to the trolls and fought them every inch of the way. Third, we won a court case against a very powerful multilevel troll system that has successfully bullied lots of the ‘big guys’ for a number of years now.”
“Basically, we sent out a strong message that you can and must fight the patent trolls. Any out-of-court settlement is just going to make them greedier, encourage them to initiate new lawsuits and generally have a negative effect on the development of the IT industry,” Kaspersky concluded.
Established in 1997, Kaspersky Lab is one of the largest privately held vendors of software security products in the world. In 2011 its turnover exceeded $600 million. The US regional offices of Kaspersky Lab are located in Miami and Boston.
