The Prior Art

Patent Litigation Weekly: At Injunction Time, Ricoh Gets the Troll Treatment

This week: Japanese office equipment manufacturer Ricoh tried to cash in on patent litigation in a market in which it no longer competes—and succeeded. But when it sought an injunction, the company didn't make out any better than your run-of-the-mill patent troll. 

Last November, Japan-based Ricoh Company and Taiwan's Quanta Computer faced off in a federal courtroom in Madison, Wisconsin. At issue was Ricoh's claim that Quanta optical drives infringed two Ricoh patents, Nos. 6,661,755 and 5,063,552. The jury ultimately agreed, and awarded Ricoh $14.5 million in damages.

Ricoh's lawyers, from Washington, D.C.-based Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans & Figel, moved swiftly to claim to what they believed should be their real reward: an injunction shutting down Quanta's optical drive business until the Taiwanese company—which assembles disk drives for Sony, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell—agreed to license the Ricoh patents. And Ricoh's lawyers made it clear in court documents that a license was not going to come cheap.

Patent Litigation Weekly: MobileMedia's Unusual Patent Infringement Campaign

This week: A closer at the holding company behind recent suits against smartphone makers Research in Motion, HTC, and, most interestingly, Apple.

MobileMedia Ideas LLC didn't create a big stir when it launched in January. Instead, the holding company simply issued a press release in which it let the world know that it would "make available" its innovations, (which is, of course, generally considered to be patent-speak for, "We will be suing people shortly"). MobileMedia, which holds 122 patents it acquired from Sony and Nokia, was even quieter when it acted on its euphemistic pledge in March by filing separate infringement suits against three leading smartphone makers.

There's nothing new or unusual about a patent-holding company tossing a few lawsuits against the wall to try to wring some cash out of the smartphone industry, which has lately become crowded with lawsuits filed by holding companies and competing companies alike. 

What is unusual is who owns MobileMedia: MPEG-LA, the private company that oversees a total of eight patent pools covering important digital video standards—MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 being the most common—used in DVD players and pretty much every other device that supports digital video. Contributors to those pools, whose contents MPEG-LA has licensed to literally hundreds of companies, include Hewlett-Packard, Panasonic, Sony, and Cisco subsidiary Scientific Atlanta (see full list). MPEG-LA's CEO Larry Horn also heads MobileMedia. 

Patent Litigation Weekly: DataTreasury Wins First Patent Trial, Against U.S. Bank

While the patent world awaits a Bilski ruling that could have a dramatic impact on business-method patents, an East Texas trial victory in a case involving, yup, business-method patents adds fuel into a what could become a billion-dollar licensing campaign for a holding company.

On March 26, an East Texas jury ordered U.S. Bancorp to pay $27 million for infringing check-imaging patents held by DataTreasury. That sum—which could be tripled since the infringement was found to have been willfull—will be added to the more than $350 million that DataTreasury has already collected from some 30 other banks and check-processing companies that have agreed to license the small company's patents. (Verdict Form, PDF).

The verdict is a first for DataTreasury, which has two additional trials scheduled against a total of eight banks. In those cases, the holding company is demanding a combined $1.39 billion in damages—more than half of it from Bank of America for processing 64 billion checks in a manner that DataTreasury says infringes its patents.  (See p. 5 of Scheduling Order, PDF).