Microsoft, Dell, Gateway sued over video patents

A CASE FILED in a Southern California district court on the 24th of April alleges Gateway, Dell and Microsoft have breached patents connected with video encoding.

The Multimedia Patent Trust, a Delaware statutory trust, said it has an agreement with Lucent which transferred its rights to 5,136,377; 5,500,678 and 5,563,503 with the rights to sue for past infringements.

Patent 5,136,377 is called "Adaptive non-linear quantizer" and issued on the 4th of August 1992. The 5,500,678 patent called "Optimized scanning of transform coefficients in video coding" was granted on the 18th of March 1996. The 5,563,593 patent - "Video coding with optimized low complexity variable length codes" - was issued on 8th of October 1996 with a certificate of correction issued on 28th of March 2006.

The trust alleges Dell, Gateway and Microsoft have infringed these patents in different ways. It wants damages for the infringements, for its costs and for its expenses. µ

* MEANWHILE a separate case against Microsoft alone was filed in a Texas court by James Taylor, alleging it has breached patent number 5,469,572. "post compile optimizer for linkable object code."