patent infringement
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Sharp slaps Samsung with LCD patent infringement lawsuit
As if the cutthroat price wars in the LCD space weren't demanding enough, Samsung is now being forced to attend to a lawsuit that Sharp just filed over LCD patent infringement. Reportedly, Sharp is seeking "compensation as well as the prohibition of sales of products that it alleges infringe five of its LCD patents, including one that relates to technology used to enhance display quality." The products in question include Samsung televisions and monitors as well as mobile handsets that feature Samsung's LCD modules. Unsurprisingly, Samsung refused to comment on pending litigation, but a Sharp spokeswoman went so far as to say that it had "been in talks with Samsung, but it appeared difficult to solve the matter through negotiations," which apparently led to a lawsuit being filed. So much for talking things out, eh?
LG countersues Hitachi for PDP patent infringement... sigh
Just two months after Hitachi sued LG for PDP patent infringement in the litigious-playgrounds of Texas, LG has countersued Hitachi of course. LG's suit seeks monetary compensation and an injunction prohibiting Hitachi from violating its seven plasma display panel patents. Exactly the same claim Hitachi made earlier give-or-take a few patents. While we're fine with the plausible defense of intellectual property, LG's comment on the maneuver has us worried about a bleak future for consumer electronics litigation, "Japanese firms are filing more and more lawsuits as competition in the global display market has increased dramatically. We will proactively deal with the situation based on our patented and patent-applied-for technologies." In other words, firms must sue to compensate their dwindling margins. To make matters worse, LG and Hitachi are (or were) close business partners in areas which include consulting and data storage. A partnership with a Vision statement based on "mutual trust." Riiight.
Encyclopaedia Britannica sues TomTom, Magellan for alleged patent infringement
TomTom has already tussled with Garmin over alleged patent infringement, but it looks like the company has now drawn some ire from a slightly more unexpected source, with Encyclopaedia Britannica now suing it, along with Magellan and, somewhat curiously, American TV & Appliance (a retailer based in Wisconsin). So far, about the only thing that's known about the lawsuit -- which was filed May 21 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin -- is that Encyclopaedia Britannica is claiming that the companies infringed on some of its patents for a "computerized map system." Exactly how that applies to these three particular companies and not everyone else, we're not sure, though we're sure we'll be hearing more about it soon enough.
Qualcomm pays out $19.6 million to Broadcom in patent suit
Looks like the pockets of Qualcomm are going to be about $19.6 million lighter real soon, as a federal jury in Santa Ana, California returned verdicts that found "certain Qualcomm products" infringing on three patents owned by Broadcom Corporation. The lawsuit was originally filed way back in May of 2005 and alleged that five of its patents had been violated, but during the course of the trials, Broadcom ditched one of the claims while the court stayed the case with respect to a second. Notably, none of the patents that were infringed upon were "developed specifically in connection with cellular technology or standards," but the seemingly willful wrongdoing will indeed cost Qualcomm just shy of $20 million -- that is, until a trial judge mulls this thing over and determines if the firm should face any additional financial punishment "based on the finding of willfulness."
IP Innovation sues Apple over violating obscure GUI patent
Apparently, just about every graphical user interface that Apple churns out was patented and put on lock down years decades ago, as now a patent holding firm (IP Innovation) has filed a much-delayed lawsuit against the Cupertino-based outfit over its use of an OS interface. The patent in question dates back to 1984 via references in a 1991 filing by Xerox, which actually linked to GUI concepts drafted in the 1970s on the company's Alto workstations. Amazingly, the folks involved have just got around to slapping a lawsuit on Apple for selling OS X with "workspaces provided by an object-based user interface that appear to share windows and other display objects." The incredibly vague wording could realistically be used to target nearly every major OS that we've seen, and considering that Apple and Xerox already went a round in the legal ring back in 1989 over similar issues, this one certainly seems to lack substance. As expected, the $20 million claim was filed in the patent troll haven that is Marshall, Texas, and while we haven't heard word from an Apple spokesperson regarding the matter, we'd say there's a more pressing matter on the table for Jobs & Co. right now anyway.
Hitachi sues LG over plasma patent infringement, tries to halt US sales
Just when Hitachi had us all believing that it was planning on reaching new heights in the plasma market thanks to a ginormous PDP set and a thirsty overseas crowd, now we're seeing the fallback plan. Of course, we can't really suggest that Hitachi's latest lawsuit on LG's (surprise, surprise) plasma displays have anything to do with the firm's dreary numbers, but it has nevertheless filed a lawsuit in the ill famed "district court in Texas" (read: patent troll heaven) saying that "the South Korean company infringed its plasma display-related patents." The suit seeks the obligatory "monetary compensation for damages," but more interesting is the tidbit that requests a "permanent injunction prohibiting LG's plasma display panel product sales in the United States." According to a Hitachi spokesperson, the two outfits had "been in talks regarding the appropriate licenses for these seven patents," but apparently, neither side is backing down anytime soon.
HP slams Acer for alleged patent infringement
It looks like Acer has managed to find itself on HP's bad side as of late, with the latter company accusing the former of patent infringement and both companies now headed to court to sort things out. According to HP, Acer's been violating five of patents in a number of its desktops, laptops, and displays -- in particular, those relating to "DVD editing, processing ability, and power consumption and efficiency," The New York Times reports. As a result of that alleged bad behavior, HP's now asking for an injunction to prevent the products in question from being sold in the United States, as well as demanding the ever-popular "unspecified damages." For its part, Acer appears to be staying mum on the matter, and we suspect that'll be the case until the whole brouhaha's been resolved.
Verizon wins permanent injunction against Vonage
Ruh roh, bad news for Vonage today. In one of the nearly ten million patent infringement suits that we're closely following, a U.S. District judge has issued a permanent injunction against leading VoIP provider Vonage, barring the upstart telecom from using any technology protected by the three Verizon patents it has been convicted of infringing. In response to the ruling, company execs issued a statement attempting to reassure customers and reiterate its intent to appeal, although that didn't stop panicked investors from pushing shares down 6.2% before trading was halted. Specifically, Vonage wants you to know that you "will not experience service interruptions or other changes as a result of this litigation," claiming that it expects to prevail in an appeals process which starts in two weeks. If District Judge Claude Hilton decides at that time to make the injunction effective, Vonage can still plead its case in front of the Federal Court of Appeals -- however, Hilton's analysis of the injunction's potential effects on both parties seems to squarely Verizon, which doesn't bode well for Vonage even in a higher court. In other words, there's no reason for Vonage users to start freaking out just yet, but if we were in your shoes, well, we might at least start window shopping for a new landline network.Read - ReutersRead - Vonage PR
Patent troll going after AMD for infringement
"Those who can, do; those who can't, sue." Although the original version of this phrase is (unfairly) used to describe teachers, we think that it does a nice job summing up the current state of the consumer electronics industry as well; it seems that nary a week goes by these days without some "intellectual property firm" crying patent infringement against a company that actually makes something, and this time around it's silicon powerhouse AMD being taken to the mat by lawsuit-happy Opti Inc. According to Reg Hardware, do-nothing Opti is suing AMD for violating three of its patents covering "Predictive Snooping of Cache Memory for Master-Initiated Accesses," and is hoping that a jury will decide to ban the sale of those chips which supposedly employ this arcane technology. As a bit of background, Opti started out as a chip developer itself before selling most of its assets to another company called Opti Technologies (no relation); after the sale, Opti Inc. was de-listed from NASDAQ due to a business plan that hinged on "pursuing license revenues from companies we believe are infringing Opti's patents." While it's tempting to dismiss this suit as yet another baseless gold-digging scheme, Opti -- like NTP -- does have a history of prying cash away from big ballers in the industry: in late 2004, the company accused NVIDIA of violating these same patents, and was able to wrest somewhere around $7 million from the graphics powerhouse. Sadly, with Transmeta suing Intel, SGI suing ATI, and now Opti targeting AMD, it looks like most of the PCs we buy next year will be labeled Via Inside.Read- Opti vs. AMDRead- Opti vs. NVIDIA
Palm sez NTP patents are invalid, refuses to settle
Following yesterday's surprising announcement that patent troll firm NTP is taking portable computing pioneer Palm to court over alleged IP infringement, the PDA and smartphone manufacturer has fired back with a statement detailing its position on the matter. While Palm corroborates NTP's assertion that the latter company had previously approached it about licensing the patents in question, it points out that all seven of them are still undergoing re-examination by the US Patent and Trademark Office, and all signs point to them being ruled invalid once the inquiry is complete. Therefore, Sunnyvale-based Palm has promised to "defend itself vigorously against the attempted misuse of the patent and judicial systems," which is the diplomatic way of saying that NTP won't see one red cent unless they pry it from Palm's cold, dead hands. Since the RIM / NTP fiasco took quite some time to wind its way through the courts, it seems that Palm is making the smart move here by stringing this along until the USPTO makes its final decision, but there's one thing it needs to bear in mind: NTP's got half a billion dollars to blow on legal fees, and since it doesn't actually do anything besides sue people, it can focus all of its energy and resources on this amusing but unhealthy lawsuit addiction.
TomTom loses latest round in Garmin dispute
So it looks like it won't be a Garmin-free European Christmas for TomTom after all: despite the Dutch manufacturer's claim that its American rival has been copying the design of its nav units, a judge in The Hague has ruled that there are in fact "clear differences" between the two companies' products. TomTom originally filed the suit two weeks ago in hopes of forcing Garmin's devices off of European shelves during the lucrative holiday spendfest; however, the angular design of StreetPilot units was judged to be dissimilar to the curvier Go products even at first glance. Although this latest round of legal shenanigans finds Garmin coming out on top, TomTom is still waiting for the results of another summary proceeding, and of course, there's always the small matter of those three patent infringement suits that have yet to be settled. Since both companies come out with very capable products, we can't say that we have a preference regarding the outcome of this dispute, although we wouldn't mind if Garmin won just enough money from TomTom to keep the latter company from producing anymore of those awful TV commercials.
SGI suing ATI for...well, you know the rest
Oh how the mighty have fallen: fresh off its emergence from Chapter 11, once-proud hardware manufacturer SGI (a.k.a. Silicon Graphics) chose to celebrate the occasion not with a product announcement or by gifting its employees with bunch of iPods, but by dropping one of the ol' patent infringement lawsuits on recent AMD acquisition ATI. According to the suit, ATI has been violating a 2003 patent covering a "display system having floating point rasterization and floating point frame buffering," which in layman's terms describes a method for "software to operate directly on data in a frame buffer" -- apparently "an important resource in achieving [the] enhanced graphics processing demanded by today's computer systems." Now we're not knocking SGI for defending its intellectual property -- after all, other rival manufacturers have seemingly validated its claim by licensing the patent in question -- but is getting your litigation on really the best way to show the world that your company is back on the field and ready to innovate? The answer seems to be yes, at least according to CEO Dennis McKenna, who is promising that this legal maneuver is just the first of many designed to "aggressively protect and enforce [SGI's] IP." Fair enough, but please make sure that your engineers are doing their R&D thing while legal does its, um, legal thing, or else SGI may go down in history next to another sullied three-letter acronym: NTP.[Via Slashdot]
TomTom sues Garmin, but surprisingly not for patent infringement
As you probably already know, there's nothing we love more around here than some intense courtroom drama (our Series3 is already at capacity thanks to 24/7 Law & Order), so we were excited to learn that the age-old grudge match between GPS kings Garmin and TomTom is about to enter a thrilling new chapter. To quickly recap the events so far: American manufacturer Garmin sued its Dutch rival over patent infringement in February of this year (something about technologies designed to calculate which streets are important enough to a driver's route to be displayed), after which TomTom countersued with infringement claims of its own. Garmin then fired back at TomTom in August with yet another patent claim, but instead of continuing this amusing game of tit-for-tat, TomTom decided to go after its rival in familiar territory, filing a suit in The Hague that accuses Garmin of copying the look and feel of its devices. As The Register notes, Garmin and TomTom split the US market 50.8% / 26.9% and the European market 16.7% / 30%, respectively, so the stakes in this battle are pretty high, with each company fiercely trying to one-up the other on its home turf. Since all of these legal proceedings will probably take years to get sorted out, your best bet is to just sit back, enjoy the show, and don't let either combatant lure you off a cliff or into a big pile of sand.
Echostar injunction stayed pending outcome of appeals process
Even though its customers were the ones getting down at nationwide TiVo House Parties this past weekend, it was the company itself that woke up with a nasty hangover. In the latest development surrounding the most drawn-out patent dispute the consumer electronics industry has seen since that RIM / NTP debacle, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has just granted DISH-parent Echostar a temporary stay on an injunction that would have shut down its DVR service and halted sales of related hardware. You probably remember that TiVo won a $74 million jury verdict in this case back in April, when the Texas panel apparently agreed with the DVR pioneer that Echostar (who also had access to an early TiVo prototype box) had violated its so-called "Time Warp" patent. After much legal posturing, the award was upped to $90 million and the satellite TV provider was given 30 days to disable the time-shifting functionality on its STBs; luckily for DISH customers, the injunction was granted a temporary stay while the merits of Echostar's appeals case were weighed. Well the court has finally ruled that Echostar does indeed have a solid case, and that the company can therefore continue offering DVR services until its appeals have been exhausted. Sounds like bad news for TiVo, until you notice a snippet of Echostar's followup press release which reads, "We also continue to work on modifications to our new DVRs, and to our DVRs in the field, intended to avoid future alleged infringement." If Echostar is so confident in its lack of culpability here, why make changes to its supposedly non-infringing devices? Stay tuned, folks, as this one's not over yet -- not by a long shot.[Via Zatz Not Funny]
Ricoh nails Quanta and Asustek for patent infringement
Looks like Ricoh is the latest firm with the need to flex its legal muscles a bit, in this case getting litigious with Quanta Storage and Asustek over four of its supposedly-violated patents relating to CD-RW and DVD+RW technologies. The legal proceedings were recently filed at a US District Court in Wisconsin, although Quanta and Asustek both apparently refused to make an assessment of the case -- saying they hadn't yet received notification of the lawsuit (ever hear of FedEx, Ricoh?) -- and have also refused to negotiate at all before the case reaches court. For its part, Ricoh is looking for royalties dating back to 2004, when it stopped producing optical disc drives altogether. But don't worry, Q and A, you can at least take some consolation in the fact that you're in pretty good company when it comes to alleged patent infringement.[Via TG Daily]
Holy moly... lawsuit overload for consoles
Anascape Ltd. wants to make some money, fast. They can't quite decide on a new marketing scheme, or an innovative product. Someone jokingly suggests they sue the big console companies for a dozen patent infringements. The boss likes the idea and they do. Yes, that's right. Nintendo and Microsoft are under fire from this company for breaching patents on game controllers. Joystiq does a nice job of recounting the numerous charges, so to save redundancy, they will be omitted here. But, twelve? That's a lot.You may have noticed Sony isn't involved in this one. But, looking at the charges, especially, well, all of them, Sony's controller should be in the middle of this one also. But it isn't! Hooray? Even so, if Anascape wins this case, Microsoft and Nintendo will have to bleed money. Will it help PS3 gain ground in the next console war? Doubtfully, but at least for once there's a patent lawsuit where Sony isn't getting manhandled. Still... how many of these lawsuits are popping up? If there's a season for tornadoes, there's a season for "get rich quick by suing bigger companies" season. One of these is a lot longer than the other.
Verizon sues Vonage over patent infringement
It wouldn't be a full day here at Engadget without someone suing someone else for patent infringement, and thankfully Verizon has stepped up to the plate to provide our daily dose of entertaining legal shenanigans. The telecom giant has filed suit against VoIP provider Vonage in Richmond, Virginia's U.S. District Court, claiming that certain aspects of Vonage's Internet telephony business -- specifically its methods for interfacing between packet-switched and circuit-switched networks, billing customers, detecting fraud, and providing enhanced calling services -- violate at least seven of Verizon's closely-guarded patents. What really seems to be getting under Verizon's skin is the fact that Vonage has added 1.1 million new customers in the past 15 months -- many of whom are claimed to be "Verizon's former customers" -- by "aggressively marketing and advertising services made with Verizon's appropriated intellectual property." Vonage, of course, denies any wrongdoing, and claims in language we've heard so often before that it will "vigorously defend the lawsuit;" investors, however, don't seem to be quite as sure that Vonage is in the right here, as evidenced by the 12% tumble that the company's stock took today.
Cable giants being sued for VOD patent infringement
If nothing else, you've got to admire the tenacity of a Connecticut-based firm called USA Video Interactive, which just days after losing what seems to be a final appeal in its lawsuit against Movielink, decided to go after almost all of the country's major cable operators for supposedly infringing on the same patent. Comcast, Cox, Charter, and Time Warner (disclosure: Time Warner owns the company that owns the network that includes Engadget) are all named in a suit filed Tuesday in a U.S. District Court in Texas by USA Video (maybe Cablevision got spared because of all its other legal woes), which claims that like Movielink, the cable giants are violating its so-called Store-and-Forward Video-on-Demand patent (#5,130,792, filed in 1990) by using protected technology in their own VOD services. Besides making patents, the company also offers various products revolving around email, web tools, digital video watermarking, and content delivery infrastructure, so it's probably not appropriate to bunch it in with other lawsuit-happy -- but seemingly less legitimate -- claimants such as NTP and Visto.[Via TechWeb and Digital Media Thoughts]
Philips sues Kodak over patent infringement
It's been a mixed day over at Philips: on the one hand, they had the pleasure of announcing a new offspring, Liquavista, but now they've been forced to air some dirty laundry concerning fellow consumer electronics manufacturer Kodak, taking the NY-based company to court for allegedly infringing upon a sixteen-year-old patent. Philips claims that while several digital camera manufacturers license the JPEG compression technology protected by patent number 4,901,075 (refer to the schematic above for all of the technical details), Kodak refuses to do so, even though many of their products supposedly take advantage of the "Huffman codeword" magic outlined within. Financial details of the suit have not been made public, but Kodak doesn't sound like it's going to budge, saying that it will defend itself "vigorously."[Via Reuters]
