6,321,338; 6,484,203; 6,708,212; & 6,711,615 were asserted. Phillip Porras was the named inventor in all patents. The priority date is November 1978.

The defendants filed a summary judgment motion of invalidity, which was granted.

Slack-jawed SRI stuttered that the only way the prior art reference could have been found was to be told by one of the authors or by "dumb luck." Delaware district court Judge Robinson retorted, "To a person of skill in the art, browsing a few folders on the plaintiff's FTP site surely requires less effort than searching the libraries of the world or browsing hundreds of documents." Duh.

That said, a search of "Porras" on the CiteSeer scientific literature database site reveals the anticipatory reference: "EMERALD: Event Monitoring Enabling Responses to Anomalous Live Disturbances (1997)" as the first citation, published a year before the patents were filed.

SRI was represented by Fish & Richardson, who should have known better.

--

If you want to assert a patent, and your legal team hasn't suggested a preemptive prior art search, call Patent Hawk. If you have a patent asserted against you, call Patent Hawk. Patent Hawk is a patent killer; regardless of where you sit, if patents are involved, Patent Hawk will save you a lot of money.