It seems that this weekend will not be that great after all for the Cupertino based firm as EPL Holdings files a lawsuit right after Motorola sued them at ITC.
AS per the lawsuit filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by EPL Holdings, the iPhone maker has stolen its media playback technology and used the same on their iPhone and iPad. EPL Holdings also goes on to claim that they had met Apple way back on 28th January, 2002 in order to discuss licensing terms for the technology which allows users to play back video-audio at slower and faster speeds. The two parties entered into a NDA in February 2002, which expired on February, 2006.
At that time Apple had offered EPL a mere $50,000 for use of the patent which was flatly declined by Enounce, EPL’s predecessor for being too small an amount for the valuable technology. EPL adds that since then Apple has been using the technology without their consent and has managed to make billions of dollars of products that contain the technology.
These are the two patents in question, 5,175,769 (’769 patent) and 7,683,903 (’903 patent). Although, a patent infringement case is being filed by EPL almost after seven years of when it actually have been, the fact that Apple and EPL execs had a meeting gives the lawsuit more credibility.
Here is a link for the document of the patent lawsuit filed by EPL Holdings against Apple.
What baffles me is the rate at which Apple manages to be involved in one or the other patent cases across the globe irrespective of them being the ones filing it or vice versa.