A California court trial involving patent infringement allegations against co-defendants Apple and LG Electronics began on Tuesday, with Alcatel-Lucent's Multimedia Patent Trust asserting the two electronics makers violated video compression technology used in a number of devices.
The jury trial, being heard by the U.S. District Court for the Southern Distrcit of California, is directly related to a 2010 complaint filed by the Paris-based technology company's Multimedia Patent Trust in which both Apple and LG were accused of copying efficient data transmission tech pertaining to videos, reports Bloomberg.
âApple and LG have chosen not to license these patents while 33 other companies have paid over $190 million for these licenses,â said one of the patent trust's attorneys, Frederick Lorig. Counsel went on to explain that he failed to successfully negotiate a deal with Apple despite having already set licensing terms with Motorola worth some $18 million. "Apple sells four times the number of infringing products that Motorola does,â he said.
According to the suit, Apple's iPhone, iPad, iPod and MacBook lines, as well as LG's Chocolate Touch VX8575, Bliss UX700, Touch AX8575, Lotus Elite LX610, Mystique UN610 and Samba LG8575, infringe on the trust's patents.
âThe motion pictures you see on your screens are made possible by these patents,â Lorig said. âThis technology lets you download in half the time and store twice as much content.â
Representatives for Apple and LG countered during their opening statements, saying that MPT had already been paid for the technology in the for of an "pay-as-you-go" pool of funds. The attorneys said the trust is attempting to extend its patent claims to cover new technology.
âLG and Apple are not going to pay rent for technology they do not use,â said Apple attorney Juanita Brooks. âWhy are we here in this trial? They are trying to get $170 million from Apple. I can think of 170 million reasons they are asking us to pay more than all of the other licensees combined.â
LG's counsel, Michael McKeon, added, "What we have here is MPT trying to double dip. It is suing over technology it does not own.â
Apple is accused of infringing upon three Alcatel-Lucent patents compared to LG's two, with MPT asking for a "reasonable royalty" based on fees it would have been paid prior to the alleged infringement.
MPT is looking for undisclosed damages with the possibility of trebling, or tripling, the judgment amount if Apple and LG are found to have infringed willfully, as well as court fees.
The trial is scheduled to continue tomorrow at 9 a.m. and is expected to conclude within the next two weeks.
15 Comments
"The motion pictures you see on your screens are made possible by these patents," Lorig said. "This technology lets you download in half the time and store twice as much content."
Regardless of the validity of this statement or these claims, Apple immediately gives these guys the finger and dumps all video content except HEVC.
Boom. Welcome to the future. Thanks, lawsuits!
Someone had a flow chart of who is suing who. I need to see a new version. Is there any tech company who is not being sued or suing someone. The majority of companies probably fall into the sued and suing.
Apple immediately gives these guys the finger and dumps all video content except HEVC.
Great. We already have to encode in four codecs for our web videos, why not add a few more? They really need to consolidate a joint, joint, joint committee on joint committees. I propose JJJJJJJJMPEG
We already have to encode in four codecs for our web videos…
The idea is to drop that. What four codecs? I can think of FLV, MP4… what else? Really the web should only need MP4 and HEVC, at least until the latter has playback capability in both major desktop and mobile OS'.
We already have to encode in four codecs for our web videos…
The idea is to drop that. What four codecs? I can think of FLV, MP4… what else? Really the web should only need MP4 and HEVC, at least until the latter has playback capability in both major desktop and mobile OS'.
M4V, OGV, WebM, FLV