Thursday, July 4, 2013

Court Awards Summit 6 $15M in Patent Lawsuit

Case Summary
A patent infringement suit was filed by Summit 6, a patent holding company against RIM, Samsung, Multiply, Facebook and Photobucket in violation of their patents cover software and methods for pre-processing media, such as digital photographs, before transmission to a remote location. The suit was filed in the Texas District Court on Feb 23, 2011. The patents in the suit were: 
US6895557 - Web-based media submission tool, issued on May 17, 2005
US7765482 - Web-based media submission tool, issued on Jul 27, 2010
Both the patents expire[i] by Jul 21, 2019. The patents were originally assigned[ii] to Pictureworks Technology (owned by iPIX) and currently assigned to Summit 6 (source: MaxVal’s Assignment Database).  Summit 6 alleged that the defendants are infringing its technology to manufactures devices and/or operate websites where digital content is compressed before being uploaded to and received by a remote server.
RIM, Multiply, Facebook and Photobucket settled the case and Samsung was the only defendant left in the trial. On Jan 26, the Court rendered its final verdict, ordering judgment in favor of Summit 6 with a $15M award.  
See case 3:11-cv-00367 for more details. To get alerts on cases filed/closed, subscribe to our Litigation Alerts.
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[i] Expected expiration date. Patent Term Estimator is a free web-based tool that automatically calculates patent terms and expiration dates for U.S. utility patents
[ii] MaxVal offers Patent Assignment Alert service where subscribers receive email alerts when assignments relating to target applications, patents or entities of interest are recorded.

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