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Microsoft Slammed With Two More Patent Suits

Microsoft Slammed With Two More Patent Suits

Back in 2006, the New York Times claimed Eastern Texas "the patent lawsuit capital of the nation,” and there might well be some truth to that. It’s where Canadian company i4i won a $240 million judgment against Microsoft, including an injunction against it selling Word.

Now, in that same jurisdiction, Microsoft has been hit by two more patent lawsuits, according to Information Week.

Speech recognition company Allvoice Developments US is claiming that the speech recognition software that built into the XP and Vista operating systems violates its patent, and is seeking unspecified damages.

Microsoft Ordered To Stop Selling Word

Microsoft Ordered To Stop Selling Word

Back in May, Microsoft lost a high profile patent infringement case when a Texas judge found in favor of Canadian software firm i4i. The Redmond giant was ordered to pay $200 million as a royalty for infringing a 1998 i4i patent issued in 1998, U.S. Patent No. 5,787,499. The software covered by that patent removed the need for individual, manually embedded command codes to control text formatting in electronic documents, and Microsoft used technology in several products, including Word 2003 and Word 2007.

VoloMedia: All Your Podcasts Are Belong to Us

VoloMedia: All Your Podcasts Are Belong to Us

Sometimes the process of applying for (and receiving) a U.S. patent can take years—so long, in fact, that technologies can emerge, bloom, and wither in the time it takes for patent claims to be processed, reviewed, and approved—or rejected. In that vein, software house VoloMedia has been awarded a patent for a “Method for providing episodic media content” that it claims covers the basic technology behind podcasting, including managing episodes, setting priorities, and syncing the material with a portable device.

Vizio Clears Customs

Vizio Clears Customs

Low-cost television maker Vizio has scored a victory in its long-running patent dispute with Funai: U.S. Customs has certified that current Vizio television models do not infringe on Funai’s controversial patent 6,115,074, which clears the way for Vizio to import the televisions into the United States and offer them for sale to consumers.

The finding could be the last gasp in the companies’ long-running patent battle: Funai had won a ruling from the U.S. International Trade Commission, which issued an order blocking Vizio from importing TVs that infringed on the patent into the United States. However, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued a final rejection of the very patent at the heart of the matter. Now, regardless of whether Funai’s patent is found to hold water, Vizio will be able to continue importing televisions into the United States.

Canada’s i4i Wins $200 Million Patent Judgement Against Microsoft

Canada

A Texas federal jury has ordered Microsoft Corporation to pay Canadian software developer i4i some $200 million in damages for infringing on a document manipulation patent in both Microsoft Word 2003 and 2007. i4i is a privately-held software company based in Toronto that focuses on content management solutions and collaborative technologies; the patent focuses on manipulating a document’s structure and content separately from each other.

Microsoft has consistently denied it has infringed on i4i’s patent, and furthermore asserts that i4i’s patent is invalid. “We believe the evidence clearly demonstrated that we do not infringe and that the i4i patent is invalid,” said Microsoft spokesman David Bowermaster, n a statement. “We believe this award of damages is legally and factually unsupported, so we will ask the court to overturn the verdict.”

Patent Suit Targets 22 Software Companies

Information Protection and Authentication of Texas (IPAT) has filed a patent infringement suit against 22 companies—including Microsoft, Symantec, CA, F-Secure, McAfee, Kaspersky, Sophos, Novell, and PC Tools—for infringing on a pair of patents issued in the mid-1990s regarding applications security and integrity. The first patent cited, 5,311,591, involves a method for authorizing what resources on a computer a particular application program can use; the second patent, 5,412,717, involves using hashes—essentially, unique mathematical identifiers—to confirm that a program hasn’t been tampered with on disk or in memory.

Worlds.com Sues NCsoft Over Virtual Worlds

Worlds.com Sues NCsoft Over Virtual Worlds

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, possibly in the form of a settlement.

Top Tech Companies Sued for Using…Icons?

Top Tech Companies Sued for Using...Icons?

Michigan’s Cygnus Systems, Inc., a company focused on networking support and development, has filed a patent infringement lawsuit (PDF) against Microsoft, Apple, and Google for&mash;get this—using icons to represents files. But not just any icons: representational thumbnails that reflect the onscreen display of a particular document or file. Such miniaturized thumbnails are now a common feature of many software products, including Apple’s Finder and iTunes software (think Cover Flow), Windows Explorer, and Google’s Chrome browser—and if Cygnus is willing to go after those three companies, they might be considering action against Adobe and Opera (which have products with similar interfaces) and even Web-based music and photo services like Amazon’s MP3 Store and Flickr which, after all, offer thumbnail representations of files.

Apple Sued Over iPhone Browser

Apple Sued Over iPhone Browser

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 granted last month. The lawsuit is being spearheaded by Stanley Gibson of the law firm Jeffer, Mangels, Butler & Marmaro, who specializes in intellectual property law and recently won a $1.35 billion payment in a case against Medtronic. The suit was filed in the Eastern District of Texas, which has generally been sympathetic to patent-holders.

Ruling May Curtail Software Patents

Ruling May Curtail Software Patents

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit—effectively the second-highest court in the U.S.—has issued a ruling rejecting a patent application that sought to patent a business method independent of any device or transformation of matter. For years, the Federal Circuit has been broadening patent rights, extending patent protection to software applications and business methods during the 1990s. The new ruling should signal an end to many types of business method patents…and, in turn, change the world of software patents, which are closely related to business process patents from a legal standpoint.

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