Microsoft Sues Barnes & Noble, Foxconn and Inventec for Patent Infringement by Android Devices

Microsoft Sues Barnes & Noble, Foxconn and Inventec http://snapvoip.blogspot.com/
Microsoft filed a complaint with the US District Court for the District of Western Washington,  and one with the US International Trade Commission (ITC). Microsoft earlier lodged complaints against Motorola with the same organization and asserted the same patents in both of them.

“The Android platform infringes a number of Microsoft’s patents, and companies manufacturing and shipping Android devices must respect our intellectual property rights. To facilitate that we have established an industry-wide patent licensing program for Android device manufacturers, HTC, a market leader in Android smartphones, has taken a license under this program. We have tried for over a year to reach licensing agreements with Barnes & Noble, Foxconn and Inventec. Their refusals to take licenses leave us no choice but to bring legal action to defend our innovations and fulfill our responsibility to our customers, partners, and shareholders to safeguard the billions of dollars we invest each year to bring great software products and services to market,”  said Horacio Gutierrez, Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel for Intellectual Property & Licensing.

The patents-in-suit are:

• US Patent No. 5,778,372 on "remote retrieval and display management of electronic document with incorporated images"
• US Patent No. 6,339,780 on "Loading status in a hypermedia browser having a limited available display area" (this is the one that was previously also asserted against Motorola)
• US Patent No. 5,889,522 on "system provided child window controls"
• US Patent No. 6,891,551 on "selection handles in editing electronic documents"
• US Patent No. 6,957,233 on "Method and apparatus for capturing and rendering annotations for non-modifiable electronic content"

 Microsoft via FOSS Patents