Netflix has filed a lawsuit against VMware, a subsidiary of Broadcom, claiming that the company has infringed on five of its patents related to virtual machine operations. The lawsuit, submitted to a California federal court, accuses VMware of using Netflix’s patented technologies without authorization for over a decade.
The patents in question—“424 Patent,” “707 Patent,” “891 Patent,” “893 Patent,” and “122 Patent”—cover key technologies for running virtual machines. Three focus on managing CPU usage in virtual machines, while the other two address methods for starting up virtual machines on physical hardware using a load balancer. Netflix alleges that VMware’s products, including VMware vSphere Foundation, VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Cloud on AWS, and similar offerings on platforms such as Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, IBM, and Alibaba, are using these patented technologies unlawfully.
Netflix claims VMware has been aware of at least one of the patents, the “424 Patent,” since August 2012. This was when the patent was referenced during the rejection of VMware’s application for U.S. Patent No. 8,650,564. Netflix describes VMware’s continued use of these technologies as “willful and deliberate.”
The streaming giant is seeking damages for the alleged violations but has not specified an amount. The lawsuit emphasizes the importance of intellectual property rights in the tech sector, particularly in areas like virtualization and cloud computing.
