DailyTech - OPTi Initiates Patent Infringement Lawsuit Against Apple

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IT OPTi Initiates Patent Infringement Lawsuit Against Apple
Tuan Nguyen (Blog) - January 18, 2007 5:58 PM

15 comment(s) - last by masher2.. on Jan 20 at 3:22 PM

Apple gets taken to court over infringements again

OPTi Inc. today announced that it has filed a lawsuit against Apple Inc. for patent infringement. According to OPTi, Apple infringed on not just one but three patents. All three patents are part of what OPTi refers to as "Predictive Snooping of Cache Memory for Master-Initiated Accesses." Apple appears to have infringed on three patents in that family: U.S. Patent No. 5,710,906, Patent No. 5,813,036 and Patent No. 6,405, 291.

According to OPTi, Apple infringed on the above patents by utilizing Predictive Snooping technology in its line of Mac servers, desktops and laptop computers. OPTi is currently waiting on a jury trial with Apple and is pursing patent infringement lawsuits with other unnamed companies as well.

So far in 2007, Apple has been met with more than one lawsuit. Cisco recently filed a lawsuit against Apple for trademark infringement of the "iPhone" trade name. Having trademarked "iPhone" many years before the actual Apple iPhone was conceived, Cisco said it is protecting its intellectual property rights. Cisco's consumer arm Linksys released its own iPhone several weeks prior to Apple.

Apple defended itself by claiming that Cisco's lawsuit was "tenuous at best," and it believes it will come out of the case with a victory. Despite Apple's optimistic outlook, analysts and legal experts believe that Cisco will win a straight forward case.

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RE: What next..?

By masher2

(blog) on 1/20/2007 3:22:52 PM , Rating: 1

Microsoft might well have had a chance to do so, when iTunes was first introduced. Given its name recognition now, however, the mark is likely close to a designation of "famous trademark" status, which gives it additional protection under the law. That's one way marks can grow stronger over time...people associate the mark indelibly with the product.

The flip side of that is genericide..where people associate the mark not with that specific product, but all similar products. Trademarks such as "nylon", "aspirin", "zipper", "fridge", etc, are all cases of mark genericide...and marks today such as "xerox" and "google" are at risk of going the same route.

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