Defunct Online VOD Company Intertainer Sues Apple, Google And Napster Over Patent
By Staci D. Kramer - Tue 02 Jan 2007 09:13 PM PST
Those of us who covered digital media and entertainment way back are very familiar with Intertainer, the high-profile movie download company that fizzled along with so many other companies too far ahead of the broadband curve. (Backers included Comcast, Microsodt and Intel.) Intertainer had 125,000 internet subs and 35,000 tv subs when it ceased operations in 2002 and switched to, well, lawsuits, first suing several of the studios that backed rival Movielink and most recently Google, Apple and Napster. The Movielink suit was settled last March. Taplin is now trying to develop a licensing busines from a handful of patents, hence the lawsuit filed last week against the three tech companies claiming infringement on a 2005 patent covering commercial audio and video distribution. Theodore Stevenson, a Dallas lawyer whose firm is representing Intertainer, told the NYT those three were chosen because they are market leaders in downloads. He also said the patent covers uploads and downloads. The suit was filed in a federal district court in Texas.
Eric Goldman, director of the High-Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law, told the NYT it was unclear just what was covered by the Intertainer patent in question. It’s described in the patent application as “a system for managing and marketing digital media content supplied by a plurality of media content suppliers to a plurality of consumers.”
Variety: “Suit was filed in the eastern district of Texas. Though neither plaintiff nor defendants are headquartered in Texas, the eastern district reportedly has become a popular place to file patent infringement suits, due to local procedures that give plaintiffs a higher-than-average success rate.”
If Intertainer succeeds—and that’s as big an if as a movie download service was in 1996—these aren’t the only three companies that will feel the pain. Don’t look for an easy resoultion to this one altough Apple did just give in on a patent claim made by Creative Technology.
Related: Content-Related Patents Granted Recently
-- Movielink Does Not Violate Anti-Trust
-- Was Intertainer’s Failure a Studio Plot?
-- Online Movie Service Intertainer to Shut Site
Posted in: Broadband, Companies, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Napster, Entertainment, Movies, Legal, Patents, Media, TV, VOD
