EpicRealm last year sued 13 companies for patent infringement.
One of those companies subsequently recovered some of its costs
from Oracle because the software vendor's terms and conditions
indemnified the firm against just such a suit.
EpicRealm was a web acceleration company until it stopped
selling its technology in 2001. The firm had been backed with $90
million in venture capital investment and at one time employed 130
people, but when it ceased trading in 2001, just a year after
raising the funding, the company's patent portfolio was one of its
few assets.
The patents, numbers 5,894,554 and 6,415,335, relate to systems
for managing 'dynamic web requests'. One was filed in 1999, the
year in which EpicRealm predecessor InfoSpinner was formed. The
other patent was first applied for in 1996.
According to news site Vnunet.com the Oracle suit has already
been filed. "Oracle [has] a reasonable apprehension that EpicRealm
will accuse Oracle, Oracle's products and/or Oracle's customers of
infringing one or more of the EpicRealm patents, and/or additional
Oracle customers will sue Oracle for indemnity as a result of
EpicRealm's patent infringement claims," Vnunet reported the
company as saying.
Last year's EpicRealm law suits were against 12 non-technology
or internet related companies and one technology firm. One of those
companies, FriendFinder, at one point accused EpicRealm of
deliberately targeting small firms in order to establish its patent
claim.
Oracle, which sells database and enterprise software, is
expected to argue not only that it does not infringe EpicRealm's
patents but that the patents themselves are invalid.
