Acacia Sues Apple over iTunes ... In East St. Louis, Again
,----[ Quote ]
| New Acacia subsidiary Restricted Spending Solutions, LLC sued Apple last
| Wednesday in East St. Louis, Illinois, in the Southern District of Illinois.
| Acacia sued Apple last November in the Southern District of Illinois over the
| iChat feature, as I reported here.
`----
http://trolltracker.blogspot.com/2008/02/acacia-sues-apple-over-itunes-in-east.html
Autodesk has designs on patent reform
,----[ Quote ]
| Design software maker Autodesk Inc spent $180,000 in the second half of 2007
| to lobby the federal government. The company lobbied on legislation related
| to patent reform, energy efficiency and intellectual property enforcement,
| according a disclosure form posted online Monday by the Senate's public
| records office. Autodesk spent $260,000 in the first six months of 2007 to
| lobby on the same issues.
`----
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/newstex/AFX-0013-22857485.htm
Recent:
http://www.groklaw.net/newsitems.php
,----[ Quote ]
| [PJ: Hahahahaha. Hey, is this sue-your-competitor-by-proxy-thing getting
| more
| and more transparent, or is it just me that finds it hard to believe a
| consumer wants her music protected Microsoft's way enough to sue over it ...
| bit of a stretch, no? That reminds me: Microsoft's Silverlight uses Windows
| Media Video:
|
| http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/%0Dpress/2007/apr07/04-15WPFEPR.mspx
|
| "We depend on Microsoft Windows Media technologies, and we’re excited about
| Microsoft Silverlight as a platform to enable instant watching of great
| content for all our members, on multiple platforms.”
|
| "Silverlight customers will also enjoy compatibility with the broad ecosystem
| of Windows Media-enabled tools and solutions, and the proven scalability and
| reliability of the Emmy Award-winning Windows Media technologies. At the
| discretion of content providers, Silverlight will also deliver digital rights
| management support built on the recently announced Microsoft PlayReady™
| content access technology — with feature parity on Windows and Mac....
|
| Microsoft Expression Media Encoder, which will be a feature of Microsoft
| Expression Media, enables rapid import, compression and Web publishing of
| digital video imported from a variety of popular formats, including AVI and
| QuickTime, into WMV."
|
| So, anyone see a possible tie-in to this litigation? Microsoft might want to
| clear that up right away. I'm guessing that Microsoft wants to own the
| Internet. And I'm sure we can all trust *them* to do the right thing with
| it.
`----
http://www.groklaw.net/newsitems.php
,----[ Quote ]
| If this is Stacie Lynn Somers, the attorney, then go to PACER and plug in her
| name, and you'll find there is some class action history there, including a
| reference to Lerach Coughlin, in an entry in an earlier case against Nextel
| that reads, "FAX number for Attorneys Theodore J Pintar, Stacie Lynn Somers,
| John J Stoia Jr with the Law Firm of Lerach, Coughlin, Stoia and Robbins is
| [redacted]."
| The firm is no longer associated with William Lerach who pled guilty last
| September to kickback schemes regarding getting plaintiffs for class action
| lawsuits. I don't see Ms. Somers listed at Coughlin Stoia now. But here's
| what
| the firm is doing including another Apple antitrust case: "The Apple iPod
| iTunes Antitrust Litig. Case No. C-05-00037-JW (N.D. Cal.). Coughlin Stoia is
| one of two firms appointed lead counsel for the proposed iPod
| direct-purchaser
| class – a class of several million people. Plaintiffs assert that Apple
| illegally tied the purchase of digital music and video files from its iTunes
| Store to the purchase of an iPod by making it impossible to play music and
| video purchased on iTunes using other portable players, and unlawfully
| monopolized the market for portable digital music players." Probably just a
| coincidence.
`----
Related:
Paul Ware and Acacia
,----[ Quote ]
| Ware and Financial Systems Innovation, LLC (a subsidiary of Acacia, formerly
| a subsidiary of TechSearch, the company now known as Global Patent Holdings)
| have filed 10 patent litigations in the last four years, against 144
| defendants. Friedman, Suder & Cooke is representing Ware and Acacia in all of
| the litigation, most of which are pending either in the Northern District of
| Georgia or Northern District of Texas. The big filing was one last June
| against 106 defendants, which I reported on here. While 3 of Ware's cases
| were settled, the rest were stayed pending the first reexamination. There are
| motions in each of those cases to lift the stay. Some are being granted, but
| in other cases, more trouble brews.
`----
http://trolltracker.blogspot.com/2008/01/paul-ware-and-acacia.html
When Patents Threaten Science
,----[ Quote ]
| Patents should not be used to protect laws of nature, products of
| nature, or mathematical formulas.
`----
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/314/5804/1395
Sprint Nextel, Acacia unit settle patent suit
,----[ Quote ]
| A subsidiary of Acacia Research Corp. and Sprint Nextel Corp. have settled a
| lawsuit alleging that Sprint Nextel had infringed on patents for technology
| used to display mobile vehicle information on maps.
`----
http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/local-news/kansascity/2008/01/02/sprint-nextel-acacia-unit-settle-patent-suit
Top Ten Patent Trolls of 2007
,----[ Quote ]
| 3. Acacia. I didn't start tracking Acacia carefully until the summer. But
| still, on my blog I have reported on over two dozen lawsuits brought by
| Acacia this year, against more than 235 defendants. That's in addition to the
| over 200 lawsuits Acacia filed in previous years against hundreds and
| hundreds of defendants. And that's not including the two lawsuits (at least)
| Acacia has filed in December against 20 more defendants (yes, Acacia, I'm
| watching you). Acacia's business model, as a publicly traded company, is to
| accumulate patents and sue as many companies as possible in order to extract
| licenses. They have a market cap of over 275 million - that pays for a lot of
| lawsuits. Unlike other trolls, Acacia tends to not focus on one court in
| particular, although they have sampled the Eastern District of Texas more
| this year than in the past.
`----
http://trolltracker.blogspot.com/2007/12/top-ten-patent-trolls-of-2007.html
Yahoo Patent Troll
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvFUSHwRXJE
Who is the world's biggest patent troll?
,----[ Quote ]
| In two consecutive days, The Wall Street Journal presented two different
| answers. The first is not surprising: Intellectual Ventures, the brainchild
| of ex-Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold. It's now out "to raise as much as
| $1 billion to help develop and patent inventions, many of them from
| universities in Asia."
`----
http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9816163-16.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Playing Microsoft Patent Poker
,----[ Quote ]
| This time though, while Ballmer slinks away to try to con … convince people
| that Microsoft Unified Communications somehow offers people more than what
| Cisco's VOIP (voice over IP) been offering customers for years, a patent
| attack finally launches at Linux. Specifically, IP Innovation, a subsidiary
| of Acacia Technologies Group, has filed a patent infringement claim against
| Linux distributors Novell and Red Hat.
|
| So was it just timing, or was it something more? Let's take a look at the
| players.
`----
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2201579,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03129TX1K0000616
,----[ Quote ]
| "There you have it. At least a third of SCO's entire market
| capitalization, and their entire current cash reserves, is payoffs
| funnelled from Microsoft. Their 10Qs reveal that every other line of
| cash inflow is statistical noise by comparison. The brave new
| SCO source business model is now clear: sue your customers, shill
| for Microsoft, kite your stock, and pray you stay out of jail."
`----
http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween10.html
Friday Patent Litigation News
,----[ Quote ]
| Reader Anthony Sabatini of New York writes to tell me that the auto-text
| patent asserted by Acacia subsidiary AutoText in Cleveland might be invalid
| in light of the Control Data Corp CDC6600 console system developed two
| decades earlier.
|
| [...]
|
| Finally, IP Innovation and Technology Licensing Corp. -- in other words,
| ACACIA -- filed a lawsuit in Marshall against Google, accusing Google's
| search engine and Google Earth of infringing two patents. This is the same
| Acacia sub that sued Red Hat and Novell over Linux, with the same lawyers -
| Johnny Ward and Eric Albritton. But these are different patents. The patents
| asserted against Google are 5,276,785 and 5,675,819, which Acacia got from
| Xerox. Nice going, Xerox.
`----
http://trolltracker.blogspot.com/2007/11/friday-patent-litigation-news.html
Acacia and Niro File Another Multi-Defendant Lawsuit on JPEG-on-a-Website
Patent, Bringing Total to 16 Companies Sued
,----[ Quote ]
| Assuming it files one per month for the next 39 months until the patent
| expires, then what Acacia is really seeking is $600M from US industry for the
| JPEG-on-a-website patent. My guess is they’ll sue many more companies than
| that, and seek up to a billion dollars – which, assuming a 33% contingency
| fee (which is low, probably), amounts to a cool $100 million per year for the
| Niro firm.
|
| And people wonder why he’d like to shut down websites critical of Acacia and
| other patent trolls. The real question is what does he want from you and me,
| for our photo blogs, our personal websites. His statements to IP Law 360 only
| referred to companies.
|
| The other real question is how many companies will spend millions in
| attorneys fees to fight rather than pay the $500K or $1M or $2M that Acacia
| is demanding. That's the sad state of patent litigation these days.
`----
http://trolltracker.blogspot.com/2007/12/acacia-and-niro-file-another-multi.html
GpsBusinessNews: Cobra settled patent litigation with Acacia Research; TomTom,
Garmin, Magellan
,----[ Quote ]
| Acacia Research Corporation today announced that its subsidiary, Mobile
| Traffic Systems Corporation (MTS), has settled patent litigation against
| Cobra Electronics Corporation that was pending in the United States District
| Court for the Northern District of Alabama. With this settlement MTS has
| entered into a license agreement with Cobra Electronics.
`----
http://www.digitalmajority.org/forum/t-39668/gpsbusinessnews:cobra-settled-patent-litigation-with-acacia-research-tomtom-garmin-magellan
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