In a pretrial ruling, judge Kent Jordan said that Business Objects did not violate a MicroStrategy patent that relates to report feature that avoid users duplicating processing requests, and that two of MicroStrategy’s patents were in fact invalid.
McLean, Virginia-based MicroStrategy had initially filed the trio of patent suits in a Delaware district court back in December 2003.
Business Object’s US division, headquartered in San Jose, California, promptly counter-sued saying that the three patents in question were not valid and pointed out that it had inherited the technologies that are under patent scrutiny through acquisition.
The judge ruled that one of the other patents, which centers around a system for optimizing report processing in a secure way, had errors related to its drafting.
He also dismissed the last patent claim on a technicality, saying that that the Crystal Info 6 reporting product (which Business Object picked up through its July 2003 acquisition of Crystal Decisions Inc) was released a year prior to filing the patent. The judge deemed this to constitute prior art. This patent relates to the automation and administration of report scheduling and delivery.
This is only a pre-trial ruling. MicroStrategy will have to decide whether the case now goes ahead to trial, previously scheduled for May 2006, to contest the invalid patent counterclaim.
Legal wrangling between the two rival BI firms has dragged on for several years, and also includes an acrimonious industrial espionage-like lawsuit that MicroStrategy is separately pursuing against Business Objects.
In November last year MicroStrategy won a reinstatement of this suit, filed back in April 2002, which alleges that several former employees who joined Business Objects had misappropriated trade secrets contained in documents, and improperly used the certain confidential information to solicit customers for Business Objects.
