Apple Sued over OS X, iPhone Infringing General Electric Patent
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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I do hate to rain on the little parade that P.D.I.C. thing they have going on here, however, (http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/kirkmck.html) seems to predate their claims somewhat.
Given that there can be no legitimate claim asserted that originated from the public domain from prior and obvious works, can the FOSS community now sue these clowns for infringement, bad faith and what ever else is reasonably applicable?
I would suggest P.D.I.C. rethink their strategy, more so, given that Berkley would also have a legitimate claim here for much the same.
I am also sure that Berkley have more law, technology and prior history on their side when it comes to defending an action at law.
Also, given the fiasco that was SCO, do they really want to enjoy that sort of fate, should they succeed in getting any real attention?
Posted by: John Harris | December 23, 2012 at 05:01 PM
It's hard to see where Apple (or anyone else) would be supposed to use this patent. Codewords stored in ROM? Unlikely. And people usually use either plain Huffman coding or arithmetic coiding; what this patent suggests would be quite unusual to do. There are plenty of techniques to adapt the coding to the data, but what this patent suggests would be of very limited utility, so I cannot imagine anyone doing it.
Posted by: Chris | December 22, 2012 at 05:00 PM