Alarm.com, iControl Resolve Patent Infringement Disputes

By Julie Jacobson

VIENNA, Va. And REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — Alarm.com and iControl, two giants in the home automation and security business, have resolved their respective lawsuits and will now fight off certain invasions from the likes of Google and Nest.

Back in May, Alarm.com, which serves independent dealers (and their customers) with its cloud-enabled home-control service, sued cellular provider Telular, which had just launched a new, competing service called Telguard HomeControl.

That service, powered by iControl, would work with security/automation panels from 2Gig, which previously had only supported Alarm.com.

Alarm.com alleged infringement on four patents.

Two months later, in July 2013, iControl sued Alarm.com for allegedly infringing on six of its patents.

In addition, the company sued security dealer FrontPoint Security for allegedly passing trade secrets from iControl to Alarm.com.

Alarm.com, founded in 2000, has more than one million security/home automation accounts. iControl, founded in 2005, doesn’t disclose numbers but serves most of the major cable companies including Comcast/Xfinity, and powers the ADT Pulse system.

The following is the statement on the lawsuit dismissals:

As part of the agreement, Alarm.com and iControl each retain all ownership and rights to their respective patents and have also expanded their respective portfolios of licensed intellectual property via certain cross-licensing agreements.

The patents included in the cross-license agreement represent some of the earliest, seminal intellectual property for Connected Home technology today.

The respective CEOs of each company commented that they were pleased to reach resolution around these serious intellectual property matters and each Company is looking forward to refocusing on its customer’s deployments.

Julie Jacobson is Editor-at-large for CE Promagazine. Follow her on Twitter @juliejacobson.

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