Patent Skirmish Erupts Between Sun and NetApp
Patent Skirmish Erupts Between Sun and NetApp
September 10, 2007: In a bid to ‘defend its intellectual property’, Network Appliance has launched a suit against Sun Microsystems seeking a declaration that it has not infringed on Sun’s patents, and that Sun’s ZFS technology actually infringes on seven of its patents.
NetApp claims that the new litigious push comes in the wake of ‘prolonged and aggressive claims’ by Sun that NetApp license some of its intellectual property. The company claims that Sun’s actions forced it to take a closer look at IP rights, leading it to believe that Sun’s claims should be dismissed as the three patents in question are invalid. Furthermore it is also seeking a ruling that Sun is infringing on seven of its US data processing systems and related software patents.
NetApp’s argument focuses on Sun’s ZFS technology, which it believes Sun unfairly distributes to third parties to “induce the adoption and distribution of the infringing technology in their products without informing them of applicable NetApp patents.”
According to a September 5th posting on his official blog, NetApp co-founder and executive vice president Dave Hitz’s wrote that “It looks like ZFS was a conscious reimplementation of our WAFL filesystem, with little regard to intellectual property rights.”
“We filed suit against Sun because after we pointed out the WAFL patents, their lawyers stopped getting back to us.”
In a post titled ‘Thank You, Network Appliance’ in his official blog, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz came out fighting on Thursday, declaring the Sun is “focused on innovation and winning customers, not litigation” and pointing out the “futility of litigation as a mechanism for proprietary companies to stifle the rise of open source competition.”
He also added that “Sun did not approach NetApps about licensing any of Sun's patents and never filed complaints against NetApps or demanded anything.”
With a quick quip about the company name being NetApp, not NetApps as Schwartz repeatedly uses in his post, Hitz claimed complete shock at Sun’s response to the suit and saying that Sun’s lawyers are demanding just that in Legalese. “Legal language can be tricky to understand, but the translation of Sun’s letter is ‘You infringe our patents, so pay us $36 million’,” wrote Hitz.
The NetApp suit stands to have a profound effect on the open source community if successful, however, Schwartz appears to be sceptical of possibility of success, pointing out Kodak’s case against it and the Java community as an indicator of how NetApp’s case is doomed.
“The rise of the open source community cannot be stifled by proprietary vendors. I guess not everyone's learned that lesson,” writes Schwartz.
Still, Hitz believes NetApp is clearly not the villain, nor out to profiteer off points of patent law. “We firmly believe that everyone is best served by fair and responsible treatment of intellectual property,” writes Hitz. “What concerns us is that through its distribution of ZFS under its own terms and conditions, Sun is unfairly encouraging others to adopt and distribute the infringing technology without informing them of our applicable patents.”
With the war of words there appears to be little chance of the two unlocking horns. There is no doubt the industry will be watching how the disagreement pans out though, and doing so very closely indeed.
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