Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Thu, 8 Apr 2010 02:30:00 PDT Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100407/1004078912.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100407/1004078912.shtml a lawsuit against a ton of companies in East Texas (of course). This one, sent in by the Bored SysAdmin, involves a company called The Pacid Group, suing Asus, Samsung, Sony, Sony Ericsson, Fujitsu, LG, Gigabyte, GBT, MSI, Motorola, Research in Motion, Nikon, Microsoft, Nintendo, HTC and Palm, claiming that they all violate two of its patents (5,963,646 and 6,049,612) on encryption. While it's often difficult to find any information on the no name companies who sue big companies for patent infringement, at least The Pacid Group has a website, where it clearly shows the company's only products: patents.

As we've seen in other similar lawsuits, the company appears to think that pretty much every bit of modern technology violates its patents. According to the lawsuit, all of the following types of products may violate these patents: laptops, mobile phones, printers, routers, digital cameras, Blu-ray disk players, gaming devices, wireless adapters and portable media players. Now, sure, you could make the claim that all of these companies found these patents from a company no one had heard of, and decided to "copy" the idea into their product. Or, the fact that this basic idea appears in so many places might lead you to conclude that the idea was the natural progression of the technology and obvious to those skilled in the art, and thus not deserving of a patent. But that would make sense.

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]]> but-of-course http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100407/1004078912 Mon, 29 Mar 2010 17:01:00 PDT Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100329/0112188757.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100329/0112188757.shtml didn't hold the trademark on the name. Instead, Fujitsu had a pending trademark on iPad and was saying it had no intention of giving up the name (and some others had trademarks on other "iPads" as well). However, it looks like just as the iPad is about to ship, Apple figured out how to make Fujitsu change its mind (I assume it involved truckloads of cash). Copycense points out that Apple has bought the "iPad" trademark from Fujitsu. It looks like the official transfer just happened on March 17th. Makes you wonder what Apple would have done if Fujitsu hadn't been willing to sell the trademark.

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]]> cutting-it-close... http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100329/0112188757 Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:56:26 PDT Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091013/1901346515.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091013/1901346515.shtml just sued Acer, Apple, Asus, Dell, Fujitsu, Gateway, HP, Sony, and Toshiba. Oh, and take a guess where this "subsidiary" set up shop? East Texas... of course. All the better to file patent lawsuits apparently...

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