DNS appliance vendors join parade pursuing patent litigation
The legal battle between leading DNS appliance vendors Infoblox and BlueCat Networks heated up yesterday, as BlueCat announced that it has teamed with patent portfolio holder Intellectual Ventures and would file its own patent-infringement claims against Infoblox in response to a similar lawsuit filed by Infoblox in December.
The Infoblox/BlueCat legal spat comes at a time when many of the leading technology vendors are suing each other for patent infringement. For example: Oracle is suing Google over its Java patents in Android; Apple is suing HTC over 20 iPhone-related patents and Samsung over iPhone and iPad patents; Motorola is suing Apple over 18 patents related to the iPhone, iPad and iTouch; and, Microsoft is suing Motorola over nine patents related to Android.
Another development likely to keep patent-related lawsuits in the news is the ongoing auction for Nortel’s portfolio http://paidcontent.org/article/419-faq-what-you-need-to-know-about-mondays-mobile-patent-auction/ of 6,000 patents and patent applications. Bidding began on Monday for the portfolio, which is expected to snare around $1.5 billion. Expected bidders include Google, Apple, Intel, Ericcson and RIM.
BY THE NUMBERS: IBM snares 5,896 patents; Apple debuts among top 50 patent winners
Infoblox and BlueCat are the top-selling vendors of network appliances that handle DNS, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) and IP Address Management (IPAM) functionality for large corporations.
Infoblox sued BlueCat in December for infringing patents related to network tree diagrams, storing ranges of DNS data in a database, extracting data out of a DNS database, and updating DNS and DHCP information.
Now BlueCat has responded by joining the Intellectual Ventures IP for Defense program and countersuing on patents in this portfolio related to automatically discovering an IP address for a device on a network and distributing network management data among multiple servers.
“These are just two of the 35,000 patents that Intellectual Ventures has that we decided to assert against Infoblox,” said BlueCat co-founder and CEO Michael Hyatt. “Our patents date back to 1998 and 1996 before the inception of their business. We believe that one of our patents reads specifically on their grid technology.”
Founded by former Microsoft executives, Intellectual Ventures has amassed a huge patent portfolio that it licenses to high-tech companies.
“If [Infoblox] sues us more, we’ll just pull out more patents and sue them back,” Hyatt said. Patent litigation “is an absolutely predatory process that stifles innovation, and it’s absolutely brutal because of the cost of the defense…With Intellectual Ventures, we have a strong hammer to strike back.”
BACKGROUND: US House approves patent reform bill
Infoblox said it had spent a great deal of time and money over the years developing its DNS technology and that it had the right to assert its patents that may be infringed upon by rivals.
“We have 230-plus engineers that are working on developing technology,” said Steve Nye, executive vice president of product strategy and corporate development at Infoblox. “We feel it’s our right, and it’s a necessity, to defend those patents.”
Nye said Infoblox was currently only suing BlueCat, but that the company will investigate any instances where it believes there may be patent infringement by a competitor.
“In the position we are in being the market leader, there are a lot of folks taking a look at what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. We’re keeping a close eye on what our competitors are doing,” Nye said, although he added that Infoblox is “not a company built around litigation.”
Ironically, one of the patents that InfoBlox sued BlueCat for infringing was a patent that was originally developed by Nortel, later sold to Avaya, and then recently purchased by Infoblox.
“We selected a group of patents – there were four or five in the bundle — that we acquired from Avaya. We sought some interesting NetID technology that we might use in our products in the future,” Nye said. “Frankly, we didn’t want other people to acquire these patents and use them against us.”
Hyatt says BlueCat doesn’t want to be involved in patent-related litigation with Infoblox but said it had no choice but to countersue.
“We don’t want to be in the courtroom. We want to innovate in the boardroom,” Hyatt said. “We never thought about patents in the past…We’re being defensive. BlueCat doesn’t want to be a party to this and believes it completely unproductive.”
