ZitoVault, LLC v. International Business Machines Corporation et al

On December 7, 2015, District Judge Rodney Gilstrap transferred ZitoVault, LLC’s case against Amazon and two of its cloud services customers to the Western District of Washington (2:16-cv-00027). The NPE had originally sued Amazon, Bazaarvoice, and Gearbox Software in March 2015 in the Eastern District of Texas (6:15-cv-00152), asserting a single patent (6,484,257) that generally relates to servicing a number of cryptographic sessions in parallel.  ZitoVault’s complaint accuses Amazon of infringing the ‘257 patent through several of its cloud computing services, including Amazon Web Services. The complaint further alleges that Bazaarvoice and Gearbox use the accused Amazon services to collect, analyze, and optimize customer feedback related to online commerce.

Less than two weeks after Amazon and others filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) of ZitoVault, LLC’s only patent-in-campaign (IPR2016-00021), the NPE has asserted the patent in a new suit against IBM and its SoftLayer subsidiary (6:15-cv-00906). ZitoVault accuses IBM’s cloud computing products and services, including IBM Cloud, SoftLayer, SoftLayer Cloud Servers, and Bluemix, of infringing a single patent that concerns creating and maintaining a plurality of cryptographic sessions over a computer network (6,484,257). The ‘257 patent has been asserted in only one other case to date, filed against Amazon and two of its customers (Bazaarvoice and Gearbox Software) in March 2015 (6:15-cv-00152).