BOBJ loses patent suit

Courtesy of CIBC’s U.S. enterprise software equity research team. As you consider what happened at Certicom (CIC:TSX) yesterday, this note will give you a sense of what patents are worth in the U.S. market:

“BOBJ Ordered to Pay Informatica $25 Million for Patent Infringement

On Monday, a federal court in San Francisco found Business Objects guilty of infringing on two of Informatica’s patents. The federal judge ordered BOBJ to pay Informatica $25 million for willfully infringing on the company’s patents. The suit pertains to a claim that INFA filed in 2002 alleging that the ActaWorks product, which Business Object now sells as Data Integrator, infringed on several of the company’s patents and in particular patents titled “Apparatus and Method for Performing Data Transformations in Data Warehousing.” Due to the fact that the jury
found BOBJ to willfully infringe on INFA’s patent, the judge is permitted to increase the royalty damages that Business Objects owes up to $75 million. INFA plans to ask for a permanent injunction on BOBJ for the infringing products.”

MRM