On June 25, U.S. District Judge Michael H. Schneider of the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Texas granted summary judgment of non-infringement to AutoZone in the consolidated patent infringement case EMG Technology, LLC v. The Vanguard Group, Inc. Bass, Berry & Sims attorneys Annie Christoff, Terry Clark and John Golwen represented AutoZone in the case.
EMG Technology filed suit claiming that AutoZone’s website infringed upon the company’s patented system for creating sister websites, specifically alleging that AutoZone reformatted its main site to create a mobile version. The court ruled that the patent-in-suit required the reformatting of a main website in HTML format into a mobile site in XML, whereas AutoZone’s main site is coded in XHTML and its mobile site is in HTML5. The court thus found that AutoZone did not infringe the patent literally or under the doctrine of equivalents. Law360 provided analysis of the case in the article “AutoZone, JC Penney Duck Claims In Mobile IP Suit.”