Cisco, Belkin, D-Link, Netgear, Dell and world+dog get sued

A CASE STARTED IN a Texas district court against Dell and Gateway with a firm called Abstrax Inc suing them for allegedly breaching its patent.

The patent in question 6,240,328 and is called "Manufacturing method for assembling products by generating and scheduling dynamically assembly instructions." The patent was originally assigned to Motorola in 1995. Abstrax alleges both firms use this method to make PCs.

And on the same day a firm called Linex Technologies Inc sued a whole raft of firms including Dell, Gateway, Netgear, Belkin, D-Link, Cisco, Acer, Asus, Lenovo, and Toshiba for breaching patent number 6,757,322.

This is called "Space diversity and coding, spread spectrum antenna and method." This patent refers to wireless transmission and reception using multiple antennae.

Linex in its suit names a number of products produced by a whole bevy of companies which, it alleges, breaches the patent (PDF file).

But Dell's not averse to a bit of litigation itself. Alson on the 1st of June, it sued Dallas Laptops and Tartan Consulting. It's alleged these firms signed up to Dell's value added reseller programme and used Dell trademarks and logo on a website called atlantispc.com. While they removed the logos, Dell alleges that the defendants violated their VAR agreement by selling its products "without adding value" by adding hardware, software or services. µ