14 DAY TRIAL // There have been many lawsuits and court meetings in the IT industry over the years, some big, some small and some still going on, as it is the case with the NVIDIA-Intel and NVIDIA-Rambus showdowns. As such, hearing of yet another patent-infringement war breaking out all of a sudden might not come as a big surprise. In this case, however, the story is not of two archrivals locked in an antitrust battle, but of a move made by a relatively small company against the world's biggest so-called IT giants.
In a typical case of patent infringement, the Canadian outfit Wi-Lan has made a typical accusation of patent violation against a not-so-typical number of laptop and cellular-handset suppliers. Specifically, Wi-Lan filed a court action through which it accused no less than 19 different companies of infringing its US Patent No 5,515,369 by selling mobile computing devices and handsets with Bluetooth connectivity. Among the accused are not only HP, Dell and Acer, the three foremost suppliers of PCs worldwide, but also Apple and Intel.
The US Patent No 5,515,369 was granted by the US patent office in 1996, was assigned to Metricon of California and describes a method by which a node in a multinode network can share frequency and frequency punchout in a frequency hopping communications network. A node specifies a random channel hopping sequence that it then uses for data transfer, as well as the means by which it can relay that same sequence to the network's other nodes. It is this technology that Wi-Lan claims is being used in the products of the 19 IT industry players.
Considering the low profile of the lawsuit, even though it was made against many, it is unlikely that the outfit will win injunctions, with a more likely outcome being small payments from the various players that will likely not want the complications of a court case.