HousingWireHousingWire
The load carried by Redfin’s legal team just got a bit lighter.Â
The patent infringement suit filed by Virtual Creative Artists (VCA) over the system Redfin uses to power its listing portal has been dismissed.Â
VCA notified the U.S. District Court in Seattle, where it filed the lawsuit a month and a half ago, that it was voluntarily dismissing the suit with prejudice, meaning that the plaintiff cannot file a new suit with the same claims, on Monday.
Since it was first filed in mid-January, Redfin had been issued a summons and the parties were granted their motion for an extension of the deadline to answer or respond to the complaint. Redfin’s response was due later this month.Â
In the suit VCA claimed that Redfin is using technology that infringes on two of the company’s patents (No. 9,501,480 and No. 9,477,665) without permission. The two patents were issued in 2016. These patents describe a system for managing and distributing user-generated content in an efficient, scalable and interactive way.
According to VCA, Redfin infringed upon these patents by creating a site that allows users to upload multimedia content, such as photos and descriptions of their listings, then filters listings based on a user’s search criteria and allows the user to interact with listings by favoriting them. Additionally, Redfin’s system is able to handle large volumes of multimedia data, which VCA claims is similar to the scalable database systems described in their patents.
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