subject: Lawsuits in the Mobile world [print this page] Lawsuits in the Mobile world Lawsuits in the Mobile world
Summit 6 LLC, a patent holding company is planning to sue Samsung and Research in Motion, amongst others for allegedly infringing an image manipulation patent it owns. In the lawsuit, Summit 6 is claiming that its staff developed the technology covered in U.S. Patent Nos. 6,895,557 and 7,765,482 during the late 1990s. These patents cover software and methods for pre-processing media, such as digital photographs, before transmission to a remote location. The company added that its patents are also credited for reducing network traffic as well as the need for extensive digital storage and reprocessing by remote servers. Summit 6 believes that the defendants are using its technology without permission to produce and sell devices and/or operate websites where digital content is compressed or otherwise processed on users' personal computers or mobile devices before being uploaded to and received by a remote server. The lawsuit is filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas against Research in Motion, Samsung, Multiply, Facebook and Photobucket. The case is Summit 6 LLC v Research in Motion Corp., et al., No. 3:11-CV-367. Irish WiMAX network operator, Imagine has sued Motorola over alleged breaches of an agreement to deploy a WiMAX network in the Irish Republic for US$124 million. The network has claimed that failures by Motorola have cost it US$23.40 million to date and will lead to cumulative losses of US$123.91 million by the end of 2013. The failures are because of inability to meet customer demand and provide a network infrastructure that met the original tender agreement. Imagine also claimed that Motorola has told it to send its complaints to Nokia Siemens Networks which in the process of buying the Motorola Networks division. Motorola is denying the claims and the court case will resume in June. The on-going legal fight between Nokia and Apple has accelerated again as Apple has filed another lawsuit in the UK against Nokia. This time it is claiming that one of Nokia's patents for scrolling technology on touch-screen handsets is invalid. The patent being questioned is one of the seven patents that Nokia is suing Apple for allegedly infringing after filing a lawsuit against the company last September in Germany. Collectively, Nokia's lawsuits against Apple in the USA, UK, Germany and the Netherlands, accuse Apple of violating 37 patents.According to Nokia spokesman Mark Durrant, Nokia is confident that all of the 37 patents it has asserted against Apple are valid. They are examining the filing and will take whatever actions are needed to protect their rights.The two companies have been fighting over their respective patents since 2009 when Nokia initiated legal action against Apple. Google and Microsoft have filed a lawsuit to shut down patent troll GeoTag. The Delaware-based suit asks the court to invalidate GeoTag's lone patent, a 1996 claim to an "Internet organizer for accessing geographically and topically based information," based on the existence of prior art. GeoTag has sued 397 different companies across ten different complaints covering the online store locators of many retailers, most of which aren't technology firms but do include AT&T, GameStop and Radio Shack. The two launching the countersuit are hoping to shut down the patent to prevent GeoTag from suing them over their own Bing Maps and Google Maps services. Both let site visitors search for local stores and could fit under the patent description if it was upheld. GeoTag has claimed to be based in Texas for the sake of improving its interaction with local courts, which are historically more likely to side with the company asserting a patent. It nonetheless exhibits the classic signs of a patent troll since it was previously owned in three different tax havens around the world and was bought for $119 million with the aim of profiting solely off of the patent. GeoTag has no actual products or services of its own. The lawsuit is potentially critical to those who use either Google or Microsoft for map data beyond just the two companies, including the engines built into Apple's Maps on iOS devices or webOS. GeoTag has made filings to go public and, with capital raised from an initial public offering, could have the financial base to sue Google, Microsoft and other companies.
