A lawsuit filed on Monday in Waco, Texas alleges that intellectual property owned by Implicit LLC has been infringed by Salesforce.com Inc. through instrumentalities performing patented methods, like one improving communication between client and server computers.
According to the lawsuit, Implicit is a Plano, Texas company. Its website states that the company was founded in 1996 “with the goal of developing distributed computing platforms for resource oriented, distributed devices and applications.” The complaint specifies that the three patents-in-suit stem from “the pioneering efforts of Edward Balassanian in the area of server architecture.”
The patents, awarded legal recognition between 2005 and 2011, reportedly set forth “a scalable distributed system architecture that provides a mechanism for client computers to request and execute applets in a safe manner without requiring the client machines to have local resources compile or verify the code that improved upon traditional implementations of architecture neutral languages that required every client perform its own verification and interpretation of intermediate code.”
The lawsuit describes several advantages the patents achieve over prior art. For example, one patented invention claims that “compilation and byte-code verification are server based and thereby provide more efficient use of resources and a flexible mechanism for instituting enterprise-wide security policies.”
The filing also points out that Implicit’s intellectual property has great commercial value to Salesforce. In support, the complaint says that shortly before its filing, Salesforce’s website ranked 153rd of all websites globally in Alexa.com’s “90 Day Trend” for global internet engagement.
The suit states three claims for infringement highlighting the defendant’s products that implement “Node.js as “Accused Instrumentalities [that] perform a method for operating on a computer system, having a client computer and a server computer, [and] for managing requests to the server computer.”
The plaintiff seeks an award of damages as well as its attorneys’ fees and costs. Implicit is represented by Devlin Law Firm LLC.
