Legal News

Motorola, TiVo, Latest Tech Heavies to Wage Patent Battle

By Ashby Jones

We don’t know if there’s a fancy “Moore’s Law”-like name for the phenomenon, but sure as the day is long, it true: The more successful a new technology product is, the greater the likelihood it’s going to get its pants sued off for patent infringement.

It’s happened to all the name-brand juggernauts throughout the years: Apple, Microsoft, Intel.

And it’s also happened to TiVo. The company got slapped with yet another infringement suit on Friday afternoon. This one, filed in federal district court in Texas, came courtesy of Motorola, which claimed TiVo infringed its patents for digital video recorders.

Click here for the WSJ story; here for the Bloomberg story; here for the complaint, filed by Motorola’s lawyers at DLA Piper.

In the complaint, Motorola says it owns multiple patents related to DVRs, including some from the mid-1990s by a group of engineers whose company was later purchased by a Motorola subsidiary. It claimed TiVo willfully infringed those patents, which were filed more than two years before TiVo’s founding.

The suit also mentions how TiVo is seeking to enforce its own DVR patents against one of Motorola’s clients. In 2009, TiVo filed its own DVR-patent case against Verizon Communications Inc., which offers DVR services through set-top boxes Motorola supplied. That case is ongoing.

Messages left for TiVo representatives seeking comment weren’t immediately returned by the WSJ.

In a statement, Motorola said it filed the suit to protect its “valuable intellectual property.”

“We pride ourselves on our strong R&D and intellectual property and will move aggressively to protect that value on behalf of our customers, partners and shareholders,” the company said.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 28, 2011 (boomark / email).