Patent Law

Silver Bullet

By Gary Odom and Jordan Kuhn

Playing catch-up to Apple's QuickTime and Adobe Flash, Microsoft has been pushing Silverlight, its multimedia offering to let users watch video through their web browsers. Massachusetts-based Gotuit Media, a multimedia vendor, is having a go at Microsoft for infringing three patents, in the Northern District of California, which is usually considered defendant-friendly.

Gotuit's patented technologies afford adding metadata tags to video, enabling search and navigation. Certainly 6,931,451 is one of the three asserted patents.

Gotuit prays for relief with an injunction (fat chance #1), damages, and attorneys' fees (fat chance #2).

This report written from an early geek news dispatch posted at PCWorld. A copy of the complaint was not available at the time of writing.

Full post as published by The Patent Prospector on July 04, 2008 (boomark / email).