While its battle against computer industry heavies over a JPEG processing standard patent is ongoing, Forgent Networks has sued 15 television and media companies over a patent covering computer-controlled video systems playing back video while recording.
The software maker sued Cable One, The Washington Post Company, Charter Communications, Comcast, TimeWarner, EchoStar, Cox Communications, and eight other companies in federal court in Texas this week. All of the targets offer digital video recording to their subscribers.
Forgent implied it could be gunning for DVR recorder makers or even personal computer manufacturers who market their products for recording television.
"This is a natural expansion of [our] intellectual property program, however, our objective remains the same; to protect our intellectual property assets from infringement, while extracting value from those assets thus maximizing shareholder returns," said Forgent chief executive Richard Snyder in a July 14 formal announcement about the cable suits.
The patent in question is known as the 746 patent, which expires in 2011 and is tied to a computer-controlled video system that allows playback during recording; the system reads the video content from the storage component. "We believe we will prevail in this action," said Snyder in his announcement, "as the 746 patent is valid, enforceable, and infringed by the defendants."
"If there is no prior art to their patent, and the patent truly matches what they claim, then they are entitled the rights to wield their patent," said Brandon Shalton of FightThePatent.com.
"While I do have an anti-patent stance towards patents in technology and software, I do recognize that the patent holder does have the right to their actions of enforcing the patent. The problem comes when the patent holder claims a patent means something that is not what the patent actually says," he continued.
Last year, computer heavyweights including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Dell, Gateway, Matsushita, Apple, Toshiba, Agfa, PalmOne, Fujitsu, Xerox, Canon, and Ricoh filed a joint complaint that Forgent's bid to enforce a 1987 signal code patent on the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) standard cannot actually be enforced. That litigation is still yet to be settled.
The JPEG patent was one of a series of patents in a portfolio Forgent acquired from Compression Labs in 1997.
