Datanet v. Dropbox: real-time file-management patents asserted in Waco

Datanet LLC sued Dropbox in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, Waco Division (Datanet LLC v. Dropbox, Inc., No. 6:22-cv-01142), filing on 31 October 2022. Datanet asserted U.S. Patent Nos. 8,473,478 and 9,218,348, both titled 'Automatic Real-Time File Management Method and Apparatus,' against Dropbox's file-management functionality — placing it among the patent-assertion suits filed in that same district against Dropbox's core sync product.

Dropbox contested the claims on two fronts at once: defending the case on the district-court docket and, separately, filing for inter partes review at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (IPR2024-00079) to challenge the validity of the asserted patents. The district-court docket closed on 28 March 2024, roughly seventeen months after filing.

What public sources reviewed for this entry do not establish is how the case actually ended — whether by settlement, dismissal, or another terminating event — and no such claim is made here. What is documented is the filing date, the patents and district asserted, Dropbox's parallel IPR challenge, and the date the docket closed; beyond that, the outcome is not confirmed in public sources.

A separate appeal docket between the same parties exists. A separate CourtListener docket, Datanet LLC v. Dropbox, Inc., No. 25-1893 (Fed. Cir.), shows an appeal from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in inter partes review IPR2024-00078, with the notice of appeal filed on 26 June 2025 and the appeal docketed on 1 July 2025. As captured on 4 October 2026, that docket shows only the initial docketing entry and no later entry or decision; the CourtListener copy was last updated on 1 July 2025, so later events, if any, are not visible to this archive. The captured page does not say which patent that review concerned or who is the appellant, and this entry does not assume the appeal relates to IPR2024-00079, the separate review cited in the sources below. No decision in the appeal has been seen. This entry's status is recorded as ongoing only because no outcome has been seen; the CourtListener copy has not been updated since the appeal was docketed.