PersonalWeb Files Patent Lawsuits Against Top Storage, Cloud Vendors

The lawsuits, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in Tyler, Texas, were brought against Amazon, Caringo, Dropbox, EMC, Google, NEC, NetApp, VMware and YouTube and seek that the nine companies be found guilty of patent infringement and forced to pay unspecified damages and costs. The lawsuits also seek ongoing royalty payments from those companies if no injunction against their alleged use of PersonalWeb's technologies is implemented.

Tyler-based PersonalWeb filed a total of six lawsuits. They include one against NEC Corporation of America; one against Google and YouTube; one against Amazon, Amazon Web Services, and Dropbox; one against EMC and VMware; one against NetApp; and one against Caringo. Google owns YouTube, EMC owns nearly all of VMware, and Dropbox uses Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3).

In the lawsuits, PersonalWeb alleges the nine companies violated eight patents. They cover patents related to data deduplication; finding data in networks using identifiers based on the content of the data; distributing and accessing data; controlling access to data; file systems using content-dependent file identifiers; access control of data; data processing using substantially unique identifiers to identify data items; and enforcement and policing of licensed content using content-based identifiers.

PersonalWeb also lists the specific products from each vendor that the company alleges violate its intellectual property. These include the NEC HYDRAstor and NEC Storage NV Series systems; Google’s QueryServing System and Google’s File System; YouTube’s Content Management System; Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon ElastiCache; Dropbox's Web-based file hosting service; EMC's Centera, Data Domain, Avamar, Atmos, VMware, and Isilon Scale-Out NAS products; and NetApp's Write Anywhere File Layout systems, SnapMirror Data Replication, SnapLock, and DataMotion products.