NetApp Gets Mixed Result in Tribunal Attack on KOM Patent (1)

NetApp Inc. scored a partial win in a Patent Trial and Appeal Board dispute with KOM Software Inc., convincing the tribunal to kill half of the latter company’s claims it alleged were invalid.

Three claims in KOM’s 6,654,864 patent were invalid because they were obvious or anticipated in light of prior art, the Patent and Trademark Office said in a decision entered Monday. The patent generally involves an approach for providing restricted write access on a medium for data storage.

NetApp, a cloud services and data management company, had challenged another three claims in the patent but didn’t convince the ...