FSI Takes Five Rivals to Court for Patent Infringement

Web security provider Finjan (News - Alert), now called FSI Inc., has filed lawsuits against five rival security firms, including Symantec and McAfee, for patent infringement.

The other three names in this litigation are Webroot Software, Websense and Sophos. The lawsuit was filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware.

Last November, M86 Security acquired Finjan and its technology, including the company's secure Web gateway products. As part of this acquisition, M86 Security also acquired non-exclusive license to its patents. Thus, the ownership of the computer security and antivirus patents and IPs remained with the original owners of Finjan. Consequently, the owners of the Finjan patents and IPs operated under a new name FSI.

Hence, to distance itself from this case, M86 issued a statement on July 15 that it is not affiliated in any way with the lawsuit recently filed by FSI. "We have absolutely nothing to do with the lawsuit recently put out by FSI", asserted M86 CEO John Vigouroux. Incidentally, Vigouroux was also the CEO of Finjan before it was acquired by M86 Security.

Early this year, FSI secured multi-million dollar investment and announced its board of directors. Board members include Eric Benhamou , CEO of Benhamou Global Ventures, Michael Eisenberg of Benchmark Capital, Adam Fischer of Bessmer Ventures, Alex Rodgers of Harbourvest and Daniel Chinn of Israel Seed Partners.

 The FSI lawsuit targets two patents. According to a report in CNET,  the two patent Nos are 6,092,194 and 6,480,962. While No 6,092,194 is issued for a system and method for protecting a computer and a network from hostile downloadables, patent No.6,480,962 relates to a system and method for protecting a client during runtime from hostile downloadables. And defines actions from downloadable files that are considered suspicious. In fact, 6,092,194 also played a role in an earlier lawsuit against Secure Computing, now owned by McAfee (News - Alert).

Last August, Finjan won a jury verdict against Secure Computing Corp. The two products charged with infringing Finjan's U.S. patents (Nos. 6,092,194 / 6,804,780 / 7,058,822) were Secure Computing's WebWasher and TSP software. In this case, Finjan was awarded $13.8 million in damages.

As per a report in TechWorld, the company asked the court to award unspecified financial damages and an injunction preventing the companies from selling their products, which include McAfee's Web Gateway (News - Alert) and VirusScan software, and Symantec's Brightmail Gateway and Norton Antivirus.

"We do not comment on pending litigation" said a spokesman for Webroot. Similarly, Symantec (News - Alert) declined to comment. Others could not be reached.