Discovery Communications has filed for a patent on an e-book reader, the Baltimore Sun reported over late last week.
The Sun notes that Discovery, which owns Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and other cable properties, filed a patent for the device in February; but the Sun notes that the patent filing was not made public until last Thursday.
TiVo shares are up sharply after hours after a federal court in Texas upheld the company’s patents in its closely watched infringement case against EchoStar.
Some day, your cellphone might be able to read you as well as your best friend or significant other, though not if you have a poker face.
Sony Ericsson filed a patent application with the U.S. Patent and Trade Office earlier this month for technology that would allow a device to create MP3 playlists based on a user’s facial expressions.
Semiconductor luminaries honored at a black-tie ceremony in Silicon Valley Saturday night didn’t get a lot of time on stage. Most posed a few seconds for a photo with their award, said a few words about how honored they were, and left the stage. Andy Grove couldn’t resist doing a little more, including comparing commerce in patents to the actions that brought down Wall Street.
The other day my colleague Kee Malesky turned me on to an incredibly interesting article from the New Scientist website about the granting of patent 7508978.
Qualcomm announced that it will pay Broadcom $891 million over a four-year period to settle their long-standing patent dispute. The deal settles all existing litigation between the companies. Each receives certain rights to the patent portfolios of the other company.
Apple and Palm kicked a lot of dirt at each other last week–acting Apple CEO Tim Cook flatly told analysts that “We will not stand for people ripping off our IP” when asked specifically about competition like the Palm Pre, and Palm responded with a similarly explicit “We have the tools necessary to defend ourselves.”
Defying skeptics who had warned that a deal would face significant hurdles, Samsung this afternoon announced that it has offered to buy SanDisk for $26 a share in cash.
Apple has applied for a patent to–no joke–extend digital rights management to tennis shoes and other articles of clothing. “What is desired,” the patent application says, “is a method of electronically pairing a sensor and an authorized garment.”
Google is pondering a floating data center that could be powered and cooled by the ocean. These offshore data centers could sit three to seven miles offshore and reside in about 50 to 70 meters of water.
Oh sure, she looks friendly enough. But don’t let her matronly, argyle looks fool you. A retired Columbia University Professor, Gertrude Neumark Rothschild, is looking to extract some cold, hard cash from a who’s who of consumer electronics giants. Otherwise, they can forget about importing their goods into the U.S. Rothschild’s complaint, filed with the U.S. International Trade Commission on Feb. 20, claims that some 30 companies are violating a patent she owns for light-emitting and laser diodes. Today, the ITC has agreed to investigate the matter. It’s worth noting that Rothschild has already successfully tested the legislative waters with lawsuits against Philips and others–the Philips matter was settled out of court earlier this month.
“Intellectual property” is one of those ideologically loaded terms that can cause an argument just by being uttered. The term wasn’t in widespread use until the 1960s, when it was adopted by the World Intellectual Property Organization, a trade body that later attained exalted status as a UN agency. WIPO’s case for using the term is easy to understand: People who’ve “had their property stolen” are a lot more sympathetic in the public imagination than “industrial entities who’ve had the contours of their regulatory monopolies violated,” the latter being the more common way of talking about infringement until the ascendancy of “intellectual property” as a term of art.
When Steve Jobs first announced the iPhone a little over a year ago, he played up the fact that Apple had filed approximately 200 patents on some of the technologies included in the phone. This seemed a bit surprising because so many of the technologies found in the iPhone were already found elsewhere–just not in as pretty a package. Also, despite all those patent claims, it hasn’t stopped a whole bunch of companies from filing patent-infringement lawsuits against Apple for technologies found in the iPhone.
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