public domain

This week’s Patently Obvious report focuses on the patent holdings of XPRT Ventures. On July 13, 2010, XPRT Ventures, LLC filed a lawsuit against eBay, Inc., PayPal, Inc., Bill Me Later, Inc., Shopping.com, Inc. and StubHub, Inc., alleging that these companies had infringed six XPRT patents pertaining to online auction and payment methods.

According to the complaint, XPRT asserts that eBay stole information shared in confidence by XPRT and integrated it into its own payment systems. XPRT is demanding at least $3.8 billion in monetary damages, in addition to treble damages.

On July 23, 2010, Thomson Licensing SAS, a subsidiary of Technicolor SA, formerly Thomson Multimedia, filed a lawsuit against three Hon Hai affiliates: Chimei Innolux, Innolux, and Chi Mei Optoelectronics, as well as MStar Semiconductor, alleging infringement of seven patents held by Thomson for thin film transistor liquid crystal displays (TFT-LCDs). The patents in question are: US 5,978,063; US 5,041,888; US 5,153,754; US 5,621,556; US 6,121,941; US 5,375,006 and US 5,648,674.

This week’s Patently Obvious report focuses on the patent holdings of Vlingo Corporation. On July 21, 2010, Vlingo Corporation filed a lawsuit against Nuance Communications, alleging infringement of five patents on speech recognition technologies which Vlingo recently purchased from Intellectual Ventures.

M•CAM's Patently Obvious™ is a weekly report providing visibility into potentially unconsidered alternatives, including art in the public domain, to patent holdings across a variety of technology areas.

On August 9th 2010, Best Medical International, Inc. filed a lawsuit alleging that Accuray Corp. (NASDAQ: ARAY) benefitted from stolen trade secrets along with patent infringement of U.S. Pat No. US 5,596,619. Further, the suit claims that 4 employees, previously employed by Best Medical stole confidential and proprietary information when they quit Best Medical to work for Accuray and that this information was used in an incremental development of the Accuray CyberKnife.

This week’s Patently Obvious report focuses on the patent holdings of 3PAR, Inc. On September 2, 2010, Hewlett-Packard weathered a bidding war with Dell Computer for 3PAR, offering $2.3 billion, or $24 a share, for the company -- almost $1.15 billion more than Dell's original offer for the company.

In the frenzy of attempting to place the winning bid, neither HP nor Dell fully considered the potential liabilities associated with owning 3PAR's intellectual property. For $2 billion, HP may have purchased the right to settle over $3 billion of new patent lawsuits.