TecSec filed its patent infringement lawsuit in February 2010 against 13 separate defendant groups, including Adobe, IBM, SAP AG, Cisco Systems, Oracle, EBay and PayPal, asserting infringement of 11 patents with a total of 380 claims in the field of computer encryption. Earlier in the case, the court stayed proceedings against all defendants except IBM.
After lengthy discovery, including IBM’s production of 7 million pages of documents, 40 depositions and 55 customer subpoenas, IBM moved for summary judgment of noninfringement, arguing that TecSec’s claims failed as a matter of law because the products did not perform every step of the asserted method patents and that it never sold products that used the entire system claimed by the patents. The court granted IBM’s motion in March 2011. The court’s summary judgment was appealed and then affirmed in part on appeal.
Adobe then moved for summary judgment in October 2014. In granting the motion, the court held that Acrobat’s Adobe software does not infringe TecSec’s patents because Adobe generates encryption dictionaries differently. Specifically, the court held, “TecSec has not raised a genuine dispute of material fact establishing that Acrobat performs the required ‘selecting’ step because it is undisputed that a user of Acrobat does not select the encryption dictionary.”
TecSec, Inc. v. IBM Corp., case number 10dv00115 (United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia).