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Brains behind Kazaa and Morpheus unleash patent storm
Personalweb nastygram has Github, Apple, Rackspace and others in the cross-hairs
Level3 has joined with Personalweb Technologies to lay complaints against another lengthy list of Internet companies.
The defendant list can be seen at the Texas Lawyer blog, and includes Yahoo!, Rackspace, Nexsan Technologies, Apple, IBM, Facebook, and Microsoft.
Personalweb has previously filed complaints against Amazon, Caringo, Dropbox, EMC, Google, NetApp, NEC, VMWare and YouTube.
Personalweb, the brainchild of Kazaa’s Kevin Bermeister and Morpheus founder Michael Weiss, has assembled a patent portfolio that covers data deduplication, data search using identifiers within the data, data distribution and access, access control, content-based file systems, and license enforcement.
The complaint (PDF here) against Rackspace says both its own cloud hosting service, and its hosting of Github, infringe the thirteen patents covered in the lawsuit.
Level3’s involvement in the case comes about as half-owner of the patents in question, which Personalweb acquired from Kinetech and Digital Island. ®
Biting the hand that feeds IT
