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Toshiba Sues Over DVD Patents
angry tapir writes "Toshiba has filed suit in a US court against Imation and several manufacturers and distributors of recordable DVD media for the alleged infringement of its patents. Imation and the other defendant companies named in the complaint do not have license agreements covering recordable DVD media with Toshiba or the DVD6C Licensing Group (DVD6C), and have engaged in the import and sale of recordable DVD media in the US without permission, according to Toshiba."
Toshiba filed suit Thursday in a U.S. court against Imation and several manufacturers and distributors of recordable DVD media for the alleged infringement of its patents.
Toshiba licenses patents essential for meeting DVD format specifications, the company said on Thursday.
Imation and the other defendant companies named in the complaint do not have license agreements covering recordable DVD media with Toshiba or the DVD6C Licensing Group (DVD6C), and have engaged in the import and sale of recordable DVD media in the U.S. without permission, Toshiba said.
DVD6C was set up by nine developers of DVD technology and formats, to license jointly their DVD patents.
Eight companies, including companies in Taiwan and India, have been named as defendants in the suit before the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin.
Toshiba's complaint seeks damages for past infringement, and requests that the court prohibit the sale, manufacture and import into the U.S. of recordable DVD media by the defendant companies.
The infringing recordable DVD media is sold in the U.S. under the Imation and Memorex brand names, Toshiba said.
Whale
Found the others: CMC Magnetics Crop., Ritek Corp., Glyphics Media, Hotan Corp, Khypermedia Corp and Advanced Media Inc in the United States.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
On the other hand, this is why killing HD-DVD was such an important thing. Putting two major patent holders (Toshiba and Microsoft) in charge of the direction of the de facto media format would have been disastrous.
Instead we've got nine major patent holders - Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Thomson, LG Electronics, Hitachi, Sharp, and Samsung - in charge of Blu-ray. Is that really an improvement ?
Which patents is it alleged that they are infringing? All of them? Some of them? Without knowing which patents they're talking about, we don't know what the fuck we're talking about. I see a lot of comments saying that Memorex &c should pay up... for what?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In other words, the companies that make the media that Imation and Memorex actually sell. Most of these "generic" sounding brands are the makers of some of the finest media available. Ritek and Khypermedia are two of the best.
Sony may not always play nice, but at least they haven't been charged with monopolistic business practices (that I'm aware of, anyway).
The USA investigated Sony for antitrust violations in 2008, as did China in 2007.
Memorex makes fuck-all. They sell CMC Magnetics and Ritek media. The Office Depot brand is just as good.
There is a relatively small number of manufacturers of DVDR media. Memorex, Imation, Maxell, etc. are just stamping their names on them.
There a nice chart at the bottom of this page
.