Files motion to move patent countersuits from plaintiff-friendly Texas district to Silicon Valley
Sun and Network Appliance filed lawsuits against each other alleging patent infringement. Sun has asked that NetApp’s suit against Sun, filed in Eastern Texas, be consolidated with Sun’s suit against NetApp in California where both companies are headquartered. The Texas court has a reputation for being plaintiff-friendly.
Sun filed a motion Monday in U.S. District Court in Northern California, in San Jose, to consolidate there the lawsuits filed by NetApp against Sun in the Eastern District of Texas Sept. 5 and a countersuit filed by Sun last week.
Sun Microsystems, based in Santa Clara, Calif., is only about 10 miles away from NetApp in neighboring Sunnyvale, so it’s more practical for the cases to be litigated in California, said Mike Dillon, Sun’s general counsel, in a blog posting. Lawyers, corporate executives, other witnesses and legal documents likely to be presented as evidence are all there, Dillon notes.
“From both a judicial and economic standpoint, it makes much more sense for the case to be in California,” he wrote.so-called patent trolls. A patent-reform bill to curb some patent-suit abuses is before the U.S. Congress.
But the Eastern District Court in Texas also has developed a reputation for litigation brought by
Sun has had to defend itself in Eastern Texas on a number of patent cases, as have other tech companies, Dillon says.blog posting Sept. 14, 2006.
“One of the current venues of choice [and there are several] is a court located in the small town of Marshall, Texas, where over 88% of jury verdicts favor the plaintiff,” Dillon wrote in a
The latest rounds of lawsuits began Sept. 5 with a Net App suit filed against Sun alleging Sun’s Zettabyte File System (ZFS) infringed on seven NetApp patents for its Write Anywhere File Layout and RAID technology. NetApp says Sun infringed its patents when it released ZFS in 2005 and then released code for it under an open source license this year, as Sun has done with much of its other software.
Sun countersued Oct. 25 in Texas against the entire NetApp product line, seeking both an injunction and monetary damages. Sun also filed further infringement claims against NetApp in the Monday filing in San Jose.
The NetApp suit followed negotiations dating to 2004, when StorageTek accused NetApp of violating its patents for storage file-management software. StorageTek was subsequently acquired in 2005 by Sun, which continued to press the patent infringement allegations against NetApp. Negotiations between the companies eventually led to NetApp’s claim that Sun uses NetApp-patented technology in ZFS.
NetApp’s founder and Executive Vice President Dave Hitz, last week described Sun’s countersuit allegations, in a blog entry as “exactly the sort of broad but vague threat that gets people so frustrated with patent litigation.”
