Dismissal Secured in Data Security Patent Infringement Case

August 22, 2016 (San Francisco, CA) – Hawkins Parnell & Young, a national litigation firm, obtained a dismissal with prejudice and order with conditions for Prime Factors, Inc., a Georgia corporation with its principal place of business in Oregon, from Protegrity Corporation, a Cayman Islands corporation, and Protegrity USA, Inc., a Delaware corporation with its principal place of business in Connecticut, in their patent cases pending as part of a MDL in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Prime Factors was represented by Carl H. Anderson of HPY's Atlanta office.

U.S. Patents 8,402,281 and 6,321,201 related to data security systems for databases, both of which were the subject of patent lawsuits claiming infringement by certain Prime Factors’ products. Protegrity sued Prime Factors and others for infringement of the patents in Connecticut in 2013. Prime Factors successfully transferred the case to San Francisco, California and subsequently participated through the joint defense group in challenging the validity of both patents at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) in Alexandria, Virginia. The PTAB ruled that the petitioners had shown “by a preponderance of the evidence” that the claims of the ‘281 patent “are unpatentable.” Later, the PTAB ruled that the petitioners had shown “by a preponderance of the evidence” that the claims of the ‘201 patent “are unpatentable.”

Protegrity conceded that Prime Factors never infringed and has abandoned all others claims for a stable of more than fifty patents that it could have made through the date of the dismissal order.