Toshiba Sues Over DVD Patents 131
angry tapir writes "Toshiba has filed suit in a US court against Imation and several manufacturers and distributors of recordable DVD media for the alleged infringement of its patents. Imation and the other defendant companies named in the complaint do not have license agreements covering recordable DVD media with Toshiba or the DVD6C Licensing Group (DVD6C), and have engaged in the import and sale of recordable DVD media in the US without permission, according to Toshiba."
Link is fine, text: (Score:5, Informative)
Toshiba filed suit Thursday in a U.S. court against Imation and several manufacturers and distributors of recordable DVD media for the alleged infringement of its patents.
Toshiba licenses patents essential for meeting DVD format specifications, the company said on Thursday.
Imation and the other defendant companies named in the complaint do not have license agreements covering recordable DVD media with Toshiba or the DVD6C Licensing Group (DVD6C), and have engaged in the import and sale of recordable DVD media in the U.S. without permission, Toshiba said.
DVD6C was set up by nine developers of DVD technology and formats, to license jointly their DVD patents.
Eight companies, including companies in Taiwan and India, have been named as defendants in the suit before the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin.
Toshiba's complaint seeks damages for past infringement, and requests that the court prohibit the sale, manufacture and import into the U.S. of recordable DVD media by the defendant companies.
The infringing recordable DVD media is sold in the U.S. under the Imation and Memorex brand names, Toshiba said.
Re:Moser Baer - India (Score:4, Informative)
Found the others: CMC Magnetics Crop., Ritek Corp., Glyphics Media, Hotan Corp, Khypermedia Corp and Advanced Media Inc in the United States.
Re:Fairness towards all licensees (Score:4, Informative)
Instead we've got nine major patent holders - Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Thomson, LG Electronics, Hitachi, Sharp, and Samsung - in charge of Blu-ray. Is that really an improvement ?
Which patents? (Score:4, Informative)
Which patents is it alleged that they are infringing? All of them? Some of them? Without knowing which patents they're talking about, we don't know what the fuck we're talking about. I see a lot of comments saying that Memorex &c should pay up... for what?
Re:Fairness towards all licensees (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, that's why there's patent corsortiums. There's the DVD6C, which handles all the patents related to DVD. If you wanted to make a DVD player/writer/disc/whatever, you pay one fee to DVD6C, and they'll break it up and pay the patent holders. For you, the manufacturer, it's easier to deal with one fee to license all DVD patents for DVD usage.
Similarly, there is the 4CEntity/5CEntity licensing out security specifications used by SD cards, DVD (CSS, but maybe DVD6C automatically offers a license?), etc.
MPEG has the MPEG-LA to license patents associated with various MPEG standards.
Blu-Ray will have its own as well, so instead of dealing with the 9 license holders, you deal with 1.
It's basically a one-stop shop for licensing of patents. Of course, since these consortiums don't own the patents, the patent holders have to go after violators. In this case, Toshiba, but the other patent holders may do the same as well outside of any other agreement. It's not like these consortiums are secret either - if you're making a product, the standards for your product will often point to whom you can license the patents from.
Re:Moser Baer - India (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Which patents? (Score:4, Informative)
USB is patented (Score:3, Informative)
Are flash drives an open standard or are they also encumbered by patents?
Both USB and SD are patented, and inventions used in high-density NAND flash memory are probably patented too.
Antitrust against Sony (Score:4, Informative)
Sony may not always play nice, but at least they haven't been charged with monopolistic business practices (that I'm aware of, anyway).
The USA investigated Sony for antitrust violations in 2008 [mashable.com], as did China in 2007 [jdsupra.com].
Re:Figures (Score:3, Informative)
Memorex makes fuck-all. They sell CMC Magnetics and Ritek media. The Office Depot brand is just as good.
There is a relatively small number of manufacturers of DVDR media. Memorex, Imation, Maxell, etc. are just stamping their names on them.
There a nice chart at the bottom of this page [digitalfaq.com]
.
SanDisk owns patents on USB flash drives (Score:3, Informative)
If USB flash drives aren't patent encumbered, can we please have our Linux installers readymade for them?
USB is patented, as is high-density NAND flash. And SanDisk took other USB flash drive makers to court in 2007 [gizmodo.com].