alleges that VMware has infringed virtual machine patents

The streaming platform Netflix has filed a lawsuit against Broadcomclaiming that Its subsidiary VMware has infringed several virtual machine patents. According to the text of the lawsuit, filed in a federal court in California, VMware has violated the rights of five patents, called 424, 707, 891, 893 and 122. The company asks Netflix in the lawsuit to compensate it for not respecting the rights to use the patents with an economic amount that has not yet been specified.

These patents cover various aspects related to virtual machines, whose mission is to run software that works with a certain operating system on a computer on which a different one is installed. Of these patents there are three that deal with the use of the CPU in it, and another two that deal with starting a minimum of a virtual machine on a physical machine using a load balancer.

According to the text, “Broadcom and VMware, jointly and seriously, have infringed, and continue to infringe«, at least one section «of the 424 patent. They have done so by creating and using products, as well as selling them and offering them at discounts in the United States and/or importing products into the United States that are covered» by said patent.

These products include «VMware vSphere Foundation, VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Cloud en AWS, Azure VMware Solution, Google Cloud VMware Engine, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, OBM Cloud para VMware Solutions y Alibaba Cloud VMware Service«. In addition, the lawsuit points out that the patent violation occurs in the rest of the products and services based on vSphere.

Additionally, Netflix notes that VMware was aware of the so-called “424 patent” at least since early August 2012, “when a researcher cited patent 424 at the United States Patent and Trademark Office when a VMware petition was rejected and was eventually admitted as US patent number 8,650,564«.

According to Reuters, Broadcom and Netflix are also involved in a separate patent dispute since 2018.. This concerns an alleged violation of Broadcom patents by Netflix related to video streaming technology. This dispute currently has open cases in California (United States), Germany and the Netherlands. The lawsuit that Broadcom filed for her in the United States has a trial date scheduled for next June.