Cloud Computing: Rackspace hits out at “patent trolls”
April 8, 2013
Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Jane McCallion.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider Rackspace has reignited its battle against alleged patent trolls, who it claims are stifling cloud innovation. The company is suing a patent assertion entity (PAE) named Parallel Iron that it claims is one America’s "most notorious patent trolls". During the last week of March, Parallel Iron sued Rackspace and 11 other defendants in a Delaware court for allegedly infringing three patents the PAE claims cover the use of the open source Hadoop Distributed File System.
In a blog post, Alan Schoenbaum, senior vice president, general counsel and secretary of Rackspace, said: “Parallel Iron is the latest in a string of shell companies created to do nothing more than assert patent-infringement claims as part of a typical patent troll scheme of pressuring companies to pay up or else face crippling litigation costs.”…
Schoenbaum further claims this is part of a long running battle dating back to 2010 when a company named IP Navigation Group (IP NAV) attempted to sue Rackspace for infringing a number of patents…
Read more from the source @ http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/iaas/5457/rackspace-hits-out-patent-trolls