OpenTV slaps Netflix with patent lawsuit Netflix has been hit by a patent infringement lawsuit by Open TV, now a subsidiary of Nagra, the Switzerland-based conditional access company, part of the Kudelski Group. It has not said what the patents are, but the filings at the US District Court for the District of Delaware show that they are all software patents. There …
I _think_ this can happen in the UK at least, but that you have to be a very persistant offender and eventually a judge can label you as a "vexacious litigant" that will then make it much harder for you to bring any case at all, no matter how legitimate - so it's used as a last restort. But I don't think there is any means for your "first case" to be attract that penalty, it will just be thrown out on the first day. Obviously I've got no idea about the US ...
Yes. (It's not as necessary in the UK because a total loser pays all of the costs. So UK patent trolling is more likely to target small fry or be done by a front companies that can be liquidated when they lose.).
Thing is though, if they own stupid patents they're completely entitled to stupid court cases to defend them.
@Turtle_Fan
Well, if technical details of the patents involved haven't been released and they cover handwavey ideas rather than specific implementations, technical analysis is difficult. And the political/business analysis is already there - though apparently you disagree with it, since you've ignored it.
I suppose the same patent company are also going to go after Lovefilm, Tesco, BT Vision, Virgin Media, TIVO and all others who provide this sort of technology. OpenTV 2 middleware is already in Sky.
Seriously. Without seeing the technical content of these patents I wonder what the patents relate too?
http://www.nagra.com/dtv/products-and-solutions/client-technologies/opentv-middleware/ shows that it's an open Ecosystem and platform.
Netflix is built on Silverlight so fail to see where to two different platforms meet.
Prosecute the victim.
If Netflix is just building on Silverlight then there's a good chance that it is their suppliers like Microsoft that are the real patent violators here. Netflix just seems to be using someone else's software. They aren't the real "violator" here.
"Given that these are all software patents, and mostly just ideas, not relating to specifics, we suspect they are completely without merit once a court has taken a deeper look and that many of the patents will not stand scrutiny."
I don't disagree that some fool is probably trying to patent what other systems have been doing for an eternity and set top boxes have been doing for only a little less time. But the fact that an invention is implemented in software makes it no less worthy of protection.
Reminds me of an old argument I used to have on quite a frequent basis with a software developer friend in the old days. His line was "I can implement that function in software", to which my response was "I can implement in hardware and it will be 100 times faster". I guess if software patents did not exist I could argue I could implement that in hardware, and get a patent on it.
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