Virnetx Loses Court Battle To Cisco Over VPN Patent

schneidafunk writes "VirnetX, a patent-licensing firm with 14 employees, has seen its stock price fall after it lost a major patent trial in Texas on Thursday. A jury there ruled that Cisco did not infringe VirnetX's patents on virtual private networks (VPNs), and that the networking giant didn't have to pay $258 million in damages."

Awwww....

[Dexter Herbivore]

Poor patent troll. I'd like to see more losses like this for these parasites.

Re:Publically traded?

[Dexter Herbivore]

No doubt it'll be structured that way to avoid liability for whatever parent group owns them. A nice little sock puppet to take all the risk and pass any reward on to the limited shareholding.

Re:Awwww....

[Anonymous Coward]

This is still a loss for Cisco. The fact that it made it to trial means they had to spend millions on lawyers and VirnetX probably made sure discovery was as expensive as possible. For patent trolls there's really no downside for them. They don't make anything, so they aren't open to countersuits, and they simply bought the patent from someone else so there's not much to do discovery against on their side.

Half the battle

[Anonymous Psychopath]

It's a good thing when companies with deep pockets stand up patent trolls and win, but I worry that they'll just move to smaller, softer targets who can't afford to fight. Even after widely-publicized losses like this we'll continue to suffer from patent trolls until we have some meaningful legal reforms.

Before complaining about the USPTO...

[Theaetetus]

... note that the jury also found that the patents were valid [tmcnet.com] over the prior art. Cisco doesn't practice the invention in the patents, but that doesn't mean that the patents don't cover a valid invention.

Re:Awwww....

[Anonymous Coward]

What doesn't sound right to me is that the one with money can decide the outcome of the trial. That problem kind of trumps all other problems I would say.