intellectual property

The VP8 encoding technology at the heart of Google's effort to spread royalty-free video across the computing industry now has a home at the Internet Engineering Task Force--but not so Google can standardize it.

VP8 is a Google codec used to convert video into a more compact form for tasks such as streaming across the Internet, broadcast over the airwaves, or storage on a camera. VP8 and the Vorbis audio codec are the basis for WebM, an open-source and royalty-free technology that Google hopes will lower barriers for using video on the Net and elsewhere. Although WebM's open-source, royalty-free nature … Read more

The Open Software Initiative and the Free Software Foundation yesterday released a joint statement, urging the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as the German Federal Cartel Office, to investigate the sale of Novell's more than 800 patents as part of its multibillion dollar sale to Attachmate in November.

In December, the OSI sent a position paper to the German Federal Cartel Office. That paper has been updated to name both software groups as the concerned parties and filed with the U.S. Department of Justice.

"Since making that filing, we have been joined by the Free … Read more

Web sites hawking pirated software and other digital goods are luring in about 53 billion visits each year.

That's according to a report (PDF) released yesterday by MarkMonitor, a company that protects online brands for its corporate customers.

Piracy sites made up the majority of the 53 billion visits, while those selling counterfeit goods such as fake prescription drugs and luxury items accounted for a considerably smaller amount of traffic: about 92 million visits a year.

MarkMonitor identified 43 sites as engaging in digital piracy. Among them, three sites--Rapidshare.com, Megavideo.com, and Megaupload.com--accounted for about 21 billion … Read more

Google just fired a broadside in the Web's codec wars.

With its alternative WebM video-encoding technology now entering the marketplace, Google announced plans today to remove built-in Chrome support for a widely used rival codec called H.264 favored by Apple and Microsoft. The move places Google instead firmly in the camp of browser makers Mozilla and Opera, who ardently desire basic Web technologies to be unencumbered by patent restrictions.

"Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed … Read more

There's plenty of criticism of the U.S. patent system for granting intellectual property protections for ideas that aren't original enough, but that hasn't stopped the corporate patent frenzy.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted 219,614 patents in 2010, a 31 percent increase over 2009, according to statistics from IFI Claims, a division of Fairview Research that tracks patent grants.

As usual, IBM topped the list--this time with 5,896 patents, a 20 percent increase over 2009. Among those, Big Blue pointed to patents for monitoring and reporting earthquakes based on data from computer … Read more

Sony wasn't about to let 2010 expire without throwing another legal action into the mobile industry's growing lawsuit mess.

LG was the target of Sony's lawyers yesterday, who urged the International Trade Commission to prohibit LG from selling phones in the U.S. because those phones supposedly infringe on patents held by Sony, according to a report from Bloomberg. The portion of the ITC's Web site that was supposed to be hosting the complaint was down this afternoon, but Bloomberg reported that patent issues with LG's Lotus Elite, Neon, Remarq, Rumor 2, and Xenon phones … Read more

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has refiled a lawsuit against several major technology companies over claims of patent infringement.

In his revised complaint filed yesterday, Allen alleges that 11 tech companies and retailers--Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, YouTube, eBay, Netflix, OfficeMax, Office Depot, and Staples--are violating patents granted to him when he headed Interval Research, a small R&D firm that he started in 1992 and ran until it went out of business in 2000.

Allen initially filed the suit in August in U.S. District Court in Seattle. At the time, Allen's Interval Licensing company--which holds the patents … Read more

Previously sealed court documents leaked to gossip site Radar Online reveal that Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the identical twins who became famous through their portrayal in the film "The Social Network," are continuing their legal action against Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and that Facebook unsurprisingly continues to denounce the claims.

To clarify: This isn't actually a new lawsuit, as a handful of media outlets reported yesterday following a report in the Daily Mail about the Winklevosses suing Facebook again. The U.K. outlet subsequently took down its story.

The partially redacted documents, which surfaced on Radar Online … Read more

Intellectual Ventures, founded by former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold, filed three patent infringement lawsuits today against nine companies in the security, memory, and chip markets.

One lawsuit names as defendants Check Point Software Technologies, McAfee, Symantec, and Trend Micro and accuses them of infringing on four of its patents related to antivirus and Internet security, according to the lawsuit available for download here.

The second suit accuses Elpida Memory and Hynix Semiconductor, makers of DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) and Flash memory, of infringing between five and seven of its patents. And the final suit alleges that three … Read more