News
Barracuda Networks Files Countersuit against Trend Micro to Defend its Intellectual Property and Use of Open Source Software
July 2008 by Marc Jacob
Barracuda Networks Inc. announced it has filed a countersuit in the Court for the Central District of California against Trend Micro. The countersuit alleges that Trend Micro infringes upon three patents owned by Barracuda Networks and seeks damages and an injunction on sales of the infringing products.
This countersuit comes as Barracuda Networks continues to defend itself, the open source community and the free and open source ClamAV project, against a claim made by Trend Micro with the International Trade Commission (ITC). That claim alleges that Barracuda Networks infringes on Trend Micro’s U.S. Patent No. 5,623,600 (‘600 patent), but effectively implies that anyone using the free and open source ClamAV software at the gateway infringes the patent. Barracuda Networks believes that the ’600 patent is invalid and further believes that neither its products nor the ClamAV software infringe the patent.
In its countersuit, Barracuda Networks claims that Trend Micro infringes upon U.S. Patent Nos. 7,093,287; 7,093,294 and 7,103,913 which were purchased by Barracuda Networks in an effort to build an intellectual property (IP) portfolio for defence. These patents, purchased from IBM and developed at the world-renowned Thomas J. Watson Research Center, detail valuable methodologies for virus protection, spam and Web filtering, and intrusion detection.
If successful, Barracuda Networks plans to contribute all of the net proceeds to help the open source community.
