Starbucks, Valtrus Jointly Drop Suit Over Alleged Patent Misuse

Starbucks Corp. and the owner of a family of patents it accused the coffee giant of infringing agreed to end Starbucks’ lawsuit brought under Washington’s state Patent Troll Prevention Act.

Details of the agreement weren’t immediately available.

Starbucks sued Ireland-based Key Patent Innovations Ltd. and its Valtrus Innovations Ltd. unit in September, alleging violations of the Washington bad-faith patent-assertion law, while also seeking to invalidate 11 of the companies’ US patents.

The coffee company said in its complaint that it had received a demand letter in which Valtures said “all offerings using” the open-source platforms Apache Kafka, HBase, Hadoop, Cassandra, ...