Fed. Circ. Affirms Validity Of Cybersecurity Patent
Share us on: By Kevin Penton
Law360 (September 19, 2018, 7:07 PM EDT) -- The Federal Circuit on Wednesday affirmed a Patent Trial and Appeal Board decision that a malware detection patent asserted against Palo Alto Networks Inc. is not obvious.
The appellate court panel determined that the board did not err in holding that an ordinarily-skilled artisan would not have combined information from patents that predated the patent held by Finjan Inc. to craft the invention, according to Wednesday’s opinion.
The Federal Circuit zeroed in on one of the previous patents, holding that the PTAB did not err in determining that the prior art would not teach an artisan to “dynamically build” a component of the invention essentially in one swoop, but rather that it would be crafted through a stream of code, according to the opinion.
“We hold that the board’s finding is supported by substantial evidence because the reference itself, by using the word ‘again,’ indicates that the data stream is lexically analyzed more than once and not simultaneously,” the opinion reads.
The patent covers a means of detecting malware in data streamed from a network onto a computer, requiring the conversion of incoming data to a so-called parse tree that is then evaluated for malicious code, according to court documents.
Palo Alto argued in a September 2017 brief to the Federal Circuit that prior art referred to as Chandnani described the “dynamic building” of a parse tree from an incoming data stream — and that a key claim of the Finjan patent rested on that process.
In its final written decision issued in March 2017, the PTAB rejected that argument, relying on Finjan’s expert testimony. The board found that Chandnani did not describe the creation of a parse tree and therefore didn’t count as the type of “dynamic building” the patent was based on.
The case previously included Blue Coat Systems Inc., but the subsidiary of Symantec Corp. departed the appeal after its parent company agreed to pay $65 million, with the possibility of up to $45 million more, to settle Finjan infringement allegations for a number of its patents, according to Finjan's Form 8-K filing in March with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Counsel for the parties could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.
U.S. Circuit Judges Jimmie V. Reyna, Alvin A. Schall and Kara F. Stoll sat on the panel for the Federal Circuit.
The patent-in-suit is U.S. Patent No. 8,225,408.
Palo Alto is represented by Orion Armon of Cooley LLP.
Finjan is represented by Paul J. Andre and James R. Hannah of Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP.
The case is Palo Alto Networks Inc. v. Finjan Inc., case number 17-2059, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
--Additional reporting by Nicole Narea and Kat Greene. Editing by Haylee Pearl.
