Defendant
4 cases as defendant.
Trend Micro Inc. is a publicly traded cybersecurity company co-founded in 1988. It is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange under ticker 4704. The company maintains dual global headquarters in Tokyo, Japan, and Irving, Texas. Trend Micro employs approximately 7,000 people globally and reported revenues of roughly $1.8 billion for its most recent fiscal year.
As a major operating company in the cybersecurity industry, Trend Micro provides a broad portfolio of security software and services for consumers, businesses, and government organizations. Its core offerings are unified under the Trend Vision One platform, which delivers endpoint protection, cloud and data center security, network security, and email and web security. The company's products are designed to protect against digital threats across various environments, including clouds, networks, devices, and endpoints for major platforms like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
Trend Micro's patent litigation history in the provided data shows it acting as a defendant, which is a typical posture for a large operating company. With one tracked case as a defendant and zero as a plaintiff, the company appears to be a target of patent assertions rather than an assertor of its own patents. The single case was filed in the Central District of California, not a venue commonly associated with plaintiffs in patent litigation.
The company's only tracked litigation is Uniloc USA, Inc. v. Symantec Corp. et al., filed in 2008. In this case, Trend Micro was one of several technology companies named as a defendant by Uniloc USA, Inc., a well-known non-practicing entity (NPE) that has filed numerous patent infringement lawsuits against a wide range of companies.
The district court found the asserted claims of U.S. Patent No. 6,073,142 to be ineligible for patenting under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The decision was subsequently appealed.
This was a consolidated action where Intellectual Ventures I LLC sued several cybersecurity companies for infringement. The district court granted summary judgment to the defendants, ruling that the asserted claims of U.S. Patent No. 6,460,050 were invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101 because they were directed to an abstract idea without an inventive concept.
The case was terminated and dismissed on September 15, 2010, likely due to a settlement between the parties.
This appeal concerned the district court's award of attorneys' fees to Trend Micro after finding the case exceptional. The CAFC vacated the fee award and remanded the case, instructing the district court to reconsider the award under the 'totality of the circumstances.'