A Patent Troll or Non-Practicing Entity by the name of Princeton Digital Image Corporation has been assigned a 1987 patent by General Electric that they're using to sue Apple with. In the last fifteen months, the company has also sued HP, Intel, Facebook, Eastman Kodak, Canon and others.
Princeton Digital Image Corporation is suing Apple with patent 4,813,056. Their official complaint before the court states that Apple's Mac OS Tiger and Leopard operating systems, iLife, iWork and Final Cut software and iPod, iPod nano and iPhone hardware infringes the patent that they were assigned.
The plaintiff states in their complaint that Apple was notified of their alleged infringement by correspondence as far back as January 2007. The case was filed in the United States Delaware District Court, Wilmington Office. No Judge has been assigned to case 1:2012cv01749.
Patent Trolling is Out of Control
A recent report published by Reuters cited a new study by Colleen Chien, a law professor at Santa Clara University which claimed that roughly 61 percent of all patent lawsuits filed through Dec. 1, 2012, were brought by patent trolls or "patent-assertion entities," or individuals and companies that work aggressively and opportunistically to assert patents as a business model rather than build their own technology. That compares with 45 percent in 2011 and 23 percent five years ago.
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