Tag archive: Eastern District

DVR pioneer TiVo has been engaged in a long-running patent dispute with Echostar, in which Echostar has been found guilty of infringing on TiVo's so-called "time warp" patent for time-shifting broadcast content. Although infringing Dish Network DVRs are still functioning pending appeal, TiVo has been awarded more than $200 million in damages after the "time warp" patent was found to be valid and enforceable back in… Read More

GPS maker TomTom has found itself in the news a bit lately. Late last month Redmond software giant Microsoft filed suit against the company, claiming the company is infringing on Microsoft patents in its Linux-based GPS devices. Some open source advocates have viewed the lawsuit as Microsoft perhaps attempting a backdoor attack on Linux: three of the eight patents cited in the suit focus on TomTom's support for FAT (file allocation… Read More

Virtual world pioneer Worlds.com has filed a patend infringement lawsuit against game developer NCsoft, maker of Guild Wars and other titles, alleging NCsoft is violating the company's patent 7,181,690 covering a method by which users can interact with a virtual, 3D space. Worlds.com has filed the suit in the patent holder-friendly Eastern District of Texas, and various sources have the company looking for a quick resolution,… Read More

Sprint and the newly-reconstituted Clearwire have faced many hurdles trying to get a nationwide WiMax mobile broadband network developed and deployed—not the least of which has been where to find the cash to roll out a nationwide network and stay ahead of LTE technology that will begin rolling out once analog television is shut off. Now, the companies face another obstacle from WiMax base station vendor Adaptix, which had filed suit… Read More

EMG Technologies, a holding company that manages patents held by Los Angeles real estate developer Elliot Gottfurcht, has filed a lawsuit against Apple, claiming the company's iPhone violates a patent covering converting HTML-based Web pages into a simplified mobile-friendly XML format. In a statement, EMG claims the iPhone uses the same technique described in their patent 7,441,196, which they applied for in March 2006 but was only… Read More

One of the most-touted features in Apple's Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" operating system is an integrated backup feature called Time Machine, which offers users a sleek, graphical way to create incremental backups and restore documents—or their entire machine—back to a fixed point in time. Now, Apple is facing a patent infringement lawsuit over Time Machine from Mirror Worlds, a now-defunct company that tried to be a… Read More

Klausner Technologies, Inc.—a patent holding company founded by the “inventor of the PDA” Judah Klausner—today filed lawsuits against Apple, AT&T, Comcast, Cablevision, and eBay's Skype service for infringing on patents related to voice messaging and visual voicemail services. Klausner's suits against AT&T and Apple seeks $360 million in damages and future royalties; the suit against Comcast,… Read More

While Google continues to expand with everything from Web 2.0 applications to cell phone operating systems, its profitable mainstay, search, is under attack. A professor at Northeastern University claims that Google’s search engine infringes on U.S. patent No. 5,694,593, which the university has held since 1997. The patent describes a method for searching through a database using different “nodes” in a network to… Read More

Canadian company Wi-LAN—which used to do broadband development but recently retooled itself as a patent holding company—has filed suit against 22 companies alleging their products infringe on Wi-LAN patents covering Wi-Fi and power consumption in DSL products. Companies named in the suits incude manufacturers like Acer, Apple, Belkin, Lenovo, Dell, D-Link, NetGear, Hewlett-Packard, Sony, Texas Instruments, Broadcom, and Buffalo,… Read More

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been very active in filing suits and claiming damages on behalf of its members for illegally downloaded music. But it’s taken on a Texas woman and suddenly finds itself with a legal fight on its hands.   Rhonda Crain has filed a countersuit against the RIAA in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Beaumont Division, claiming that Sony BMG Music… Read More

California software company VirnetX Inc. has files suit against Microsoft Corporation, alleging the software giant's VPN technologies infringe on two VirnetX patents, one of which describes a method for establishing a secure communications link, and the other describes transparently creating a virtual private network. VirnetX's suit seeks both injunctive relief and damages; the suit was filed in the patent holder-friendly United… Read More

It's like a classic schoolyard taunt: “I'm rubber, you're glue! Whatever you say bounces of me and sticks to you!” Back in October, IBM filed two patent infringement lawsuits against Amazon.com, alleging key features of Amazon's Web business—including customizing links, displaying customized ads, and ordering items from an electronic catalog—utilize patented IBM technologies. Today, Amazon… Read More

Last March, patent holding company NTP extracted a $612.5 million settlement from BlackBerry maker Research in Motion following a multi-year patent battle which went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Now, NTP has turned its attention to Palm, Inc., filing a patent infringement lawsuit against the PDA and smartphone maker in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. NTP alleges that Palm's products… Read More

New York-based cyberchat company Paltalk has filed suit against software titan Microsoft in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, alleging that Microsoft's Xbox Live in-game chat features infringe on two Paltalk patents regarding group messaging systems. Paltalk seeks an injunction prohibiting Microsoft's continued infringement, as well as damages, which the company wants tripled due to Microsoft's… Read More

“Forgent Networks has added Microsoft to the list of companies it has sued alleging infringement of a patent for a data compression technique it claims is used in the JPEG digital image standard.   The lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, comes after Forgent was unable to negotiate a licensing agreement with the Redmond, Washington-based software maker, says Michael Noonan,… Read More