LzLabs faces lawsuit against IBM on IP face-off

LzLabs has been accused of infringing on patents and stealing intellectual property (IP) through reverse engineering, according to IBM.
SIA Team
March 22, 2022

LzLabs has been accused of infringing on patents and stealing intellectual property (IP) through reverse engineering, according to IBM.

“LzLabs repeatedly infringed upon IBM’s intellectual property rights by infringing upon company patents protecting various aspects of IBM’s high-performance mainframe systems, a core technology that clients rely on for their most important workloads,” IBM said in a statement on Monday.

Two patents that outline IBM mainframe procedures that LzLabs must emulate with or translate into Intel x86 instructions, as well as two patents that improve emulation and translation efficiency, are at the center of the complaint.

The complaint was filed in Waco, Texas, in the United States District Court. LzLabs has just entered the North American market.

Another allegedly infringed patent concerns the translation of IBM mainframe applications, wherein IBM programs called by those applications are detected and an x86 substituted for each.

Aside from infringing patents without permission, LzLabs is also accused of deliberately misappropriating IBM trade secrets by dismantling IBM technologies by reverse engineering, reverse compiling, and translating IBM software, according to IBM.

As a result, IBM’s complaints have expanded to include deceptive statements and potential customer misinformation regarding LzLabs products.

IBM is requesting an injunction as well as other legal relief from LzLabs. 

LzLabs is a container migration software developer for businesses founded in 2011. LzLabs has developed a managed software container for transferring apps from mainframes to cloud or Linux environments.