Thomson sued in mpeg case
p2p news / p2pnet:- Patent management companies Sisvel SpA, based in Italy, and its US subsidiary, Audio MPEG, are suing Thomson SA, demanding that it be permanently barred from selling mp3 players, TV set top boxes and DVD and CD players using MPEG audio compression.
Copyright infringement lawsuits have been filed against Thomson and some of its subsidiaries in the US, Germany and Italy, states Sisvel, saying it and Audio MPEG have exclusive worldwide rights to license the patents owned by Philips, France Telecom and IRT covering essential elements of the ISO/IEC 11172-3 and ISO/IEC 13818-3 MPEG Standards directed to MPEG Audio layers 1, 2 and 3 (MP3) technology.
“Thousands of Thomson MP3 products have been detained by the customs authorities in Germany and continue to be detained by customs following a preliminary injunction issued by the Mannheim Court in Germany,” the companies say in a statement.
“Over 250 companies are licensed under these patents and are paying royalties. Until recently, Thomson was also licensed, but failed to renew their license in 2005.”
The lawsuits seek royalties for past infringement, punitive damages for willful infringement, attorney fees, and injunctions.
"By refusing to renew their license under the MPEG Audio patents, Thomson has ignored its duty to respect intellectual property of third parties,” says Audio MPEG president Richard I. Neal.
“This led to the seizure of its products by the Customs Authorities and made lawsuits necessary in both the United States and Europe,” adding, “Our actions both in the United States and overseas are all about accountability and responsibility."
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October 13th, 2005 at 3:29 am
What am I missing here ?
I thought Fraunhofer owned the patents to MP3 technology and Thomson was somehow connected with them.
Or is this a different Thomson ?
http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/amm/legal/index.html
Wow! All this patent stuff is really going to get crazy.
October 13th, 2005 at 5:44 am
Companies that own all these patents just for licensing them yet have no plans on using them to make any products need to lose their patents. Patents were made to protect inventors, not meant to be a cash cow for people that don’t invent anything. All these companies do is suck up patents and make money off them and stiffle innovation in the process.
There has never been no good things coming out of these business practices.
The ongoing NTP vs RIM case is a good example of this.
October 13th, 2005 at 7:36 am
If i had the money i’d take out a patent on patents, then demand the world’s patent offices be shut down for infringing on my IP. ;o)
That’d fix them. For a while at least.
October 13th, 2005 at 9:45 pm
“Wow! All this patent stuff is really going to get crazy.”
Damn straight. You have the tense wrong though. Patent law is already WAY out of control. A total farce that only a lawyer could love…
October 13th, 2005 at 9:46 pm
I second that!
October 14th, 2005 at 1:31 am
Story goes-
In the latter 80’s, early 90’s, large corporations were going through massive downsizing. Many engineers were canned and eventually started their own business or became consultants.
When the internet started to become popular, around 1996, things began to change. These small companies and consultants could now compete against large corporations without the need for large advertising budgets. Competition was fierce, as soon as a new product was announced, smaller companies (with an efficient team and much less overhead) would develop a similar or better product at a lower cost. Soon, these smaller companies were outpacing the large corporations.
By the end of the 90’s, these large corporations were losing control and started to fight back by filing numerous patents. Many of these patents were stolen ideas from smaller companies. The patent system is broken, and unfortunately, you are not required to have a working product to obtain a patent. Basically, what these large corporations did was browse the internet for new products, then filed a patent based upon the ideas of this product.
Now that patents can be searched for on the internet, several small companies, whose ideas were stolen, are building up their defense in case they’re faced with a patent infringement claim by one of these patent frenzy corporations. At least one part of their defense is to prove prior art existed one or more years before the patent was filed. A website, http://www.archive.org/web/web.php is used by attorneys to examine older website pages which are being used to prove a product already existed prior to the filing of the patent. This, of course, will invalidate many of these “stolen idea” patents.
Seems what the internet has given, can also take away.
October 14th, 2005 at 9:30 pm
enough said, everyone knew this was happening.
That’s why you should support GPL-ed eternally free-standards/codecs such as XviD4, and Ogg Theora/Vorbis…. both for your own “liability” and to promote true freedom!