PersonalWeb's office located in east Texas
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Cloud platform and social media developer PersonalWeb is suing industry giants including Google, Amazon, VMware, and Dropbox, for cloud patent infringement, according to a report by the Sydney Morning Herald. The cases allege the companies infringe eight PersonalWeb patents in their cloud products including content addressable storage and/or distributed search engine technologies.
Kevin Bermeister, the founder of music download site Kazaa, is a shareholder and non-executive chairman of PersonalWeb. The company filed separate cases last week in the United States District Court for the eastern district of Texas against Google, YouTube, Amazon, EMC, VMWare, Dropbox, NetApp, NEC and Caringo, according to the report.
The report estimates that the damages claims will be at least in the hundreds of millions of dollars per defendant.
Bermeister reached a $150 million settlement after being sued by the music industry over the Kazaa file sharing service in 2005, the report says.
Patents in the technology sector can be very broad, according to the report, making infringement inevitable as new products are developed. In fact, some companies use the threat of patent lawsuits to leverage license arrangements with competitors. Many argue that the patent system is one of the biggest threats to innovation.
ITNews says the company was deliberately established in Texas because of its favorable jurisdiction for plaintiffs in patent litigation cases.
Looking at PersonalWeb’s website, it is unclear exactly what its focus is, though its first product, StudyPods, is apparently a social learning platform that lets students connect and collaborate with each other at their own university or colleges globally. PersonalWeb says this tool aims to improve the student’s educational experience through social learning. Another PersonalWeb solution is a tool for fighting piracy and child pornography on the web, a filtering technology that uses many of its patents.
To view a full list of PersonalWeb’s patents, go to its website.
About Nicole Henderson
Nicole Henderson writes full-time for the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto, and has been writing for the WHIR since September 2010. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
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