In a patent trolling operation, Parallel Iron has sued a bunch of tech companies and banks because of the file systems
they use.
The lawsuits were filed in April and those lawsuits were refiled
in June. It also filed a bunch of new lawsuits, some of which were more specific about the file system. For example, in the
Facebook and Amazon cases, the concerned file system is the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). In the Oracle suit, it's
parallel Network File System (pNFS). Amongst all the defendants, EMC seems to be the only company who tried to first sue for declaratory
judgment in a different venue. But still EMC has been dragged in the lawsuit with all the others
in Delaware on the same day that EMC filed its own suit in
Massachusetts.
The facts of this suit suggest that the four
inventors on these patents made some amazing breakthrough, and everyone else
copied it:
"In this technological age, we
take for granted the ability to access tremendous amounts of data through our computers
and the Internet, a process that seems effortless and unremarkable. But this
apparent effortlessness is an illusion, made possible only by technological
wizardry. The amount of information that is used by many companies has
outstripped the storage capacity of individual memory devices. The information
must be stored across hundreds or thousands of individual memory devices and
machines. The ability to keep track of information as it is distributed across
numerous devices and machines, while still allowing users to retrieve it
seamlessly upon request, is a feat that was impossible until recently. It was
made possible by the innovations of technological pioneers like Melvin James
Bullen, Steven Louis Dodd, William Thomas Lynch, and David James Herbison.
Bullen, Dodd, Lynch and Herbison were, among others, members of a company
dedicated to solving the difficult problems that limited the capacity of
computer technology and the Internet, particularly problems concerning data
storage. These engineers found innovative solutions for these problems and
patented several technologies for data storage, including the ones at issue in
this case. Many of the data-access feats we take for granted today are possible
because of the data-storage inventions of Bullen, Dodd, Lynch and Herbison."
The patents in question are 7,197,662, 7,543,177 and 7,958,388, which are for
"methods and systems for a storage system." The original filing dates for the patents in question come into picture around years 2002 and 2003. For Example, the year 2002 witnessed the original filing date of the 7,197,662 patent.
