On January 22, 2020, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York denied Microsoft’s motion for summary judgment as to non-infringement, but granted its motion as to willful infringement in the matter of Kaufman v. Microsoft Corporation.
The judge found that a trial is necessary to determine whether certain steps present in Microsoft’s Dynamic Data product are automatic and thus infringing, but dismissed the willful infringement claim, agreeing with Microsoft that there was no evidence that the technology company was aware of Kaufman’s patent at the time in question. The patent infringement dispute began in April 2016, when plaintiff Michael Kaufman alleged that Microsoft’s Dynamic Data product infringed a patent related to automatic scanning functionality in relational databases.
