intellectual property

A trade show in September will be the coming-out party for video technology called HEVC or H.265, a new arrival in a hotly contested market for the best approach to compression.

HEVC, short for High Efficiency Video Coding, is for encoding and decoding video streams so they can be stored or transmitted more economically than today's dominant H.264, aka AVC or Advanced Video Coding. Specifically, HEVC allies say it can deliver the same quality video as H.264 with half the network bandwidth.

The codec has been in the making for years, but it's now almost … Read more

BELLEVUE, Wash. -- To many in the high-tech business, a troll plots his schemes in a white office building on a hill in this leafy suburb of Seattle.

This is the home of Intellectual Ventures, which, depending on whom you ask, is either the biggest, most aggressive patent troll on the planet or a pioneering company that's helping inventors get their fair share.

The question of "whom you ask" is a big one, of course. Since it was founded in 2000 by Microsoft veterans Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung, Intellectual Ventures has -- through $5 billion in … Read more

ASPEN, Colo. -- Google suggested today that it might be time for the U.S. to ditch software patents.

"One thing that we are very seriously taking a look at is the question of software patents, and whether in fact the patent system as it currently exists is the right system to incent innovation and really promote consumer-friendly policies," said Pablo Chavez, Google's public policy director.

Chavez's remarks at the Technology Policy Institute's conference here this morning come as the Mountain View, Calif. company is enmeshed in a series of legal actions involving software patents, … Read more

Apple's Facetime is the latest technology stirring up legal complaints against the Mac and iPad maker in China.

A Taiwanese man who claims to hold a patent on a "voice network personal digital assistant" technology has filed a lawsuit against Apple, alleging that his technology is used in Facetime, says blog site MIC Gadget. The Intermediate People's Court in Zhenjiang confirmed the lawsuit and contacted Apple, but the company reportedly has not yet responded.

CNET has contacted Apple for comment and will update the story if we get more information.

The Taiwanese man, known only as … Read more

Embedding a copyright-infringing video on another Web site is not illegal, a court ruled yesterday.

Judge Richard Posner ruled at the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals that MyVidster, a social video bookmarking site, did not infringe the copyright of Flava Works, a porn production company, when it embedded copyright-infringing versions of Flava Works content from third-party Web sites.

The decision overturned a preliminary injunction from 2011, imposed by a lower court after Flava Works filed suit against MyVidster in 2010.

According to the Appeals Court ruling, MyVidster "doesn't touch the data stream" and therefore doesn'… Read more

Two U.S. congressmen have introduced a bill that would force so-called patent trolls to pay the legal costs of the people they sue, if the suit is unsuccessful.

The Saving High-tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes (SHIELD) Act was introduced on Wednesday by Democrat Peter DeFazio and Republican Jason Chaffetz. The congressmen said the move was intended to save tech startups jobs, which are often threatened by such lawsuits.

"Patent trolls don't create new technology and they don't create American jobs," DeFazio said in a statement. "They pad their pockets by buying patents on … Read more

Consumers eyeing Samsung's Galaxy Nexus will continue to find the phone available for sale.

Samsung scored a minor victory this week by continuing to escape a ban on the popular smartphone, at least for the time being. On Monday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled in favor of Samsung by extending the suspension of the preliminary injunction on the Nexus.

To recount the play-by-play action, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh had given the nod to Apple in June by granting its request for the temporary ban on the Nexus based on claims that … Read more

Former Apple designer Shin Nishibori is playing hard to get at testifying in the patent showdown between Apple and Samsung.

Samsung had been counting on Nishibori to appear in court. While at Apple, he developed designs of a Sony-like iPhone, according to AllThingsD, reportedly at the behest of Apple's design guru, Jony Ive.

The maker of Android-based smartphones has been arguing that Nishibori's designs serve as evidence that Apple's iPhone was influenced by Sony. If proven to be true, those claims would help Samsung, which has been accused of copying the iPhone for its own Galaxy smartphones. … Read more

Apple and Microsoft could once again join forces to bid on a collection of patents from a beleaguered technology giant, says a new report.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the two companies -- along with Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures -- plan to band together to snatch up some or all of Kodak's patent portfolio. Initial bids for that collection of 1,100 patents are due at the beginning of next week.

The companies could face an opposing team made up of other rivals including Google, Samsung, HTC, and LG, along with San Francisco-based patent buyer and licensor … Read more