Why so glum, VMware? It's Friday. Oh, is it this $235m patent infringement invoice from Densify? Too bad, so sad

VMware is set to find itself a little lighter in the wallet after losing a nearly quarter-billion dollar patent-infringement case. A jury in a US federal district court in eastern Delaware on Friday found in favor of Densify, and against the Dell-owned IT giant, in legal battle over basic concepts of virtualization. In doing …

[Roland6]

US Patent 8,209,687 & 9,654,367

Allowing for the patentese, these do seem to be a rather clear, precise and technically detailed patent.

[Mage]

Re: US Patent 8,209,687 & 9,654,367

It's been infringed, but it should never have been awarded.

What is patentable in the USPTO is crazy.

[Muira]

Re: US Patent 8,209,687 & 9,654,367

You mean like the patent for a method of swinging on a swing that has just expired? https://patents.google.com/patent/US6368227B1/en

[John Geek]

Re: US Patent 8,209,687 & 9,654,367

I glazed over trying to read the patent, but it seems to be describing a rather basic P2V, something vmware had 15+ years ago, which surely predates this patent ?

[Snowy]

Funny

I do find it rather funny that US8,209,687 B2 references Vmware 43 times in their document.

[NorthIowan]

Re: Funny

And Vmware has 20 patents that reference it. Maybe someone should have thought about cross licensing? It's not like Vmware can say they didn't know about it.

[Roland6]

Re: Funny

> And Vmware has 20 patents that reference it.

This begs the other question: if they weren't going to cross licence then why didn't they have a prepared case demonstrating why they didn't need to licence.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Funny

"This begs the other question: if they weren't going to cross licence then why didn't they have a prepared case demonstrating why they didn't need to licence."

My reading of the patent is that there is nothing innovative - it is basically "this stuff you do while monitoring a physical server? We're going to document a method of doing this for VIRTUAL servers"

Would you cross-licence that functionality?

I'm not commenting on the US Patent offices willingness to award patents and let lawyers sort out the details...

[Anonymous Coward]

New USPTO patent

I've just patented Impeachment now I own it I'm going to sue the damnocrats

- D Trump

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: New USPTO patent

sad

[Iceberg86300]

Just saw in another article that they were also hit with trademark infringement for describing something as "yadda yadda yadda allowing the densifying of yadda yadda yadda." Basically, used exactly as how it sounds: increase the density of some feature or performance metric.

Densify is in the dictionary & has nothing to do with IT. It's a treatment for wood to increase its, you guessed it, density.

How in the *+$? did they trademark a word that literally predates their very existence? Patents are one thing, but this is absolutely ridiculous.