Van Lindberg served as Vice President of Intellectual Property at Rackspace, a cloud hosting provider. Prior to Rackspace, Lindberg spent six years at Haynes and Boone, LLP in Richardson, Texas where he practiced property and patent prosecution with emphasis on open source licensing. During his time at Haynes and Boone, Lindberg analyzed multiple patent portfolios and provided IP advice and patent prosecution services to early-stage startups. Lindberg’s expertise played well with Rackspace’s focus on OpenStack. In 2012, Lindberg was named one of “America’s Top 12 Techiest Attorneys” by the American Bar Association Journal.

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In June of 2012 Rackspace was sued by Uniloc for violating its patent “by or through making, using, offering for sale, selling and/or importing servers running Linux Kernel, which is used to process floating point operations carried out by Rackspace’s server including those servers used in conjunction with Rackspace’s hosting solutions/products.” MATH….they were sued for math!

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Lindberg knew the patent was frivolous and Rackspace did not back down. Math operations aren’t automatically unpatentable, but US District Court Judge Leonard Davis ruled that this one wasn’t novel enough to deserve patent protection and the complaint was tossed before it reached trial.

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Lindberg left Rackspace in Feb 2017 to join Dykema, a national law firm as their Sr. Counsel.