Cloudera Hit With $240 Million Patent Verdict Over Cloud-Storage Technology

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Patent owner StreamScale won a $240 million jury verdict in Waco, Texas, federal court on Friday in a patent case against data-management software company Cloudera. The jury said (PDF) after a four-day trial that Cloudera infringed three StreamScale patents related to cloud-based data storage technology. Cloudera said in a statement that it intends to challenge the decision and that it would not impact the company's customers. StreamScale attorney Jason Sheasby called the verdict a "referendum on the importance of small inventors and small businesses." StreamScale owns patents for inventor Michael Anderson's "accelerated erasure coding" technology, which the company's complaint called a "cornerstone" of modern data storage. It sued Santa Clara, California-based Cloudera in 2021 for allegedly infringing several of its patents. The lawsuit accused Cloudera's CDH open source data-management platform of violating StreamScale's patent rights. Cloudera argued its software worked in a different way than StreamScale's inventions and said that the patents were invalid. StreamScale also accused other companies, including Intel, of infringing its patents in the 2021 lawsuit. Intel filed a separate lawsuit later that year arguing that StreamScale's allegations violated a non-disclosure agreement.

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