Thirty-Six Companies Sued for Patent Infringement for Violating Patent on Spam Filtering
On July 20, 2010 InNova Patent Licensing LLC filed a patent infringement lawsuit against 36 corporate defendants in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. The suit names a “who’s who” of some of the world’s largest and most well-known companies. Defendants include: Apple; Google; 3Com Corporation; Alcatel-Lucent Holding, Inc.; American International Group, Inc.; AOL, Inc.; Bank of America Corporation; Capital One Auto Finance, Inc.; Capital One Financial Corporation; Cinemark, Inc.; Cinemark Holdings, Inc.; Citigroup, Inc.; Crossmark, Inc.; Dell, Inc.; Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, Inc.; Ericsson, Inc.; Frito-Lay, Inc.; Frito-Lay North America, Inc.; Hewlett-Packard Company; HP Enterprise Services, LLC; International Business Machines Corporation; J.C. Penney Corporation, Inc.; J.C. Penney Life Insurance Company; J.C. Penney Mexico, Inc.; J.C. Penney Reinsurance Company; JCP Publications Corp.; JPMorgan Chase & Co.; McAfee, Inc.; Perot Systems Corporation; Rent-A-Center, Inc.; Research in Motion Corporation; Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software, Inc.; Symantec Corporation; Wells Fargo & Company; and Yahoo!, Inc.
InNova claims that the defendants have infringed U.S. Patent No. 6,018,761 which “covers technology used to differentiate between spam email messages and those that users actually want to receive,” (also known as spam filtering). The patent was awarded to Robert Uomini, InNova’s founder, approximately 15 years ago. A press release by The Lanier Law Firm, which represents InNova in the case, states that the patent represents one of the “building blocks for all email communications.” InNova’s lead counsel, Christopher Banys states: “Email as we know it would essentially stop working if it weren’t for InNova’s invention. More than 80 percent of email is spam, which is why companies use InNova’s invention rather than forcing employees to wade through billions of useless emails. Unfortunately, the defendants appear to be profiting from this invention without any consideration for InNova’s legal patent rights.” The complaint claims that the defendants have used InNova’s invention without permission for years.
Techdirt has taken an incredulous view of the lawsuit and the underlying patent, noting the simplicity of the patent and the number of typos included in the short patent. The blog contends that actual spam filtering is far more sophisticated than the methods in InNova’s patent and characterizes Mr. Banys’s contention that email would stop working without the existence of the patent as laughable. Techdirt also criticized the simplicity of InNova’s website, which advertises a “portfolio” of patents. A simple review of the site quickly shows that InNova’s portfolio is solely comprised of the one patent at issue in the case.
Chad Catacchio of The Next Web noted that Microsoft (Hotmail) and Comcast are conspicuously absent from the list of defendants. However, a commenter to the blog pointed out that many of the defendant companies “have corporate offices in the area where the suit was filed.” Catacchio thinks that the case will likely be hard fought given the companies involved and the potential for a very large damage award, should InNova be found to have the rights to spam filtering.
The case is InNova Patent Licensing, LLC v. 3Com Corporation, et al., No. 2:10-cv-00251. For a link to the complaint, click here.
Wow, this is surprising. Wouldn’t that effectively make every company using a spam filter guilty of infringement? (Given, of course, that they aren’t paying InNova). Spam filters have become so ubiquitous in e-mail, both on the front and back-ends of email servers, I find it hard to believe that this case would be successful.