SAN FRANCISCO — Intellectual Ventures LLC's $17 million verdict against Symantec Corp. has disappeared in a cloud of Section 101 smoke.

U.S. District Judge Leonard Stark of Delaware ruled Wednesday that two IV patents for sorting and filtering email are drawn to ineligible subject matter. A third patent for screening computer viruses survived Stark's ruling, but the judge has suggested that the damages for that claim are less than $500,000.

Stark's ruling in Intellectual Ventures v. Symantec also aborts IV's scheduled trial next month against security software maker Trend Micro Inc. “We were just getting set up here,” said Paul Hastings partner Yar Chaikovsky, who represents Trend Micro and argued the Section 101 motion with Latham & Watkins' Douglas Lumish. “It just threw that [trial] out the window.”