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By Don Clark 

A federal judge set aside a $14 million jury verdict against Pure Storage Inc. in a lawsuit brought by EMC Corp., ordering a new trial to determine whether a key patent at issue is the case is valid.

The jury in U.S. District Court in Delaware found in March that Pure had infringed one of three patents at issue in the case brought by EMC in 2013. U.S. District Judge Richard Andrews on Thursday granted Pure's motion for a new trial to settle whether the patent is invalid because some of its claimed inventions had been disclosed in another company's patent.

EMC and Pure are fierce rivals in the market for data-storage hardware. Pure, which went public last year, helped pioneer a new segment of the market that uses chips called flash memory instead of disk drives to store data.

EMC, which is set to be acquired next week by Dell Inc., was originally known for disk-based systems. But the company is now a major supplier of systems using flash technology as well.

An EMC spokesman declined to comment on the judge's ruling.

Joe FitzGerald, Pure's general counsel, said he was pleased with the decision. "We continue to believe that we will ultimately prevail in the patent infringement case -- and today's ruling is a major step in that direction," he wrote in a blog post Thursday.

Pure shares rose 2% Friday to $11.92. EMC shares declined 0.3% to $28.77.

The jury in March ruled that Pure had infringed one of the three patents in EMC's case, associated with a technology called deduplication that saves space in storage systems by eliminating redundant data.

Pure argued the EMC patent was invalid because some of its inventions had been disclosed in a patent issued in 2002 to Sun Microsystems Inc., which was later purchased by Oracle Corp. The jury concluded EMC's patent claims predated the Sun patent.

Judge Andrews concluded the jury erred in that conclusion because it relied on documentation provided by inventors of the EMC patent rather than independent evidence. He ruled the Sun patent should be deemed to precede the EMC patent.

"The jury should have been instructed that the Sun patent is prior art," he wrote.

The judge denied Pure's request for a judgment that the EMC patent is invalid, a matter he ruled should be settled by another jury. EMC had asked for a permanent injunction to stop Pure from shipping infringing products, a request the judge said is now moot.

Pure's Mr. FitzGerald said the company has now introduced different deduplication software so that its current hardware no longer uses the technology at issue in the case.

Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 02, 2016 16:10 ET (20:10 GMT)

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