M·CAM’s President David Pratt featured in the New York Times article, “Has Patent, Will Sue: An Alert to Corporate America”

Date:  Mon, 2013-07-15

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA & NEW YORK, NY – M·CAM President David Pratt is featured in Saturday’s New York Times article written by David Segal titled “Has Patent, Will Sue: An Alert to Corporate America”.

An excerpt from the article:

“So, the key question: Does the Hadoop Distributed File System infringe Parallel Iron’s patents?

David Pratt, the president of a company called M·CAM, agreed to weigh in. M·CAM is based in Charlottesville, Va., and performs what it calls “stress tests” on patents on behalf of banks that are making loans to companies with intellectual property. Mr. Pratt described himself as “patent-agnostic,” which is to say he came to this task without any particular bias.

His conclusion was that Parallel Iron has a very weak case.

“The problem is, these patents are severely challenged by what we call precedent innovation,” he said, using a fancy term for ideas that are in the public domain before a patent is granted. “What’s described in Patent No. 7197662,” referring to Parallel Iron’s patent, “has been done a thousand times. I.B.M. has been doing it since the beginning of computers.”

Mr. Pratt followed up by e-mailing a patent that predates Parallel Iron’s and which, he suggested, was quite similar. As Mr. Pratt put it, “There’s virtually no chance that ‘662 and its family could survive a full-scale re-examination by the Patent Office, because there are a lot of things that could disable or destroy it.”

See more here: Has Patent, Will Sue: An Alert to Corporate America