MasHD Blog

Courts all around the country are deluged with patent infringement suits with many of them coming from the largest firms in the technology realm. Google is one of the companies that has been involved in more than a few patent infringement suits. Google has announced that it has entered into a new patent agreement. The patent licensing agreement is with Cisco and the two firms say that the agreement covers a broad range of products and technologies. Cisco says that the agreement allow the two firms to get value from the patent portfolio and helps reduce risk of litigation in the future. Google made similar remarks about the patent licensing deal reducing the potential for litigation in the future. Google also notes that the deal between it and Cisco is in direct contrast to other firms that are transferring patents to patent assertion entities. That is a direct jab at Microsoft and the other tech firms that are part of the Rockstar Consortium that seeks to enforce patents and sq...

According to a September 23 preliminary ITC ruling, HTC is infringing on Nokia’s patents with the One, and its construction. The patent refers to transmission and phone call reception enhancement, and last week, Nokia scored a win against HTC in a US court. The Wall Street Journal quotes people familiar with the matter that claim knowledge of HTC and Qualcomm joint efforts to alter the chip inside the One, in order to prevent an import ban. The ITC will consider the matter in January and, if the preliminary ruling will be still in place, HTC imports (not only for the One) could be banned in the US, unless the Taiwanese phone maker successfully tweaks the chip to stop, together with Qualcomm, the infringement. Pocketnow

This week the folks at Samsung have suggested – without saying so to the public – that they’re not about to let ASUS leave them in the dust with a phone that docks into a tablet. While Samsung’s device isn’t exactly the same as the ASUS Padfone, the trademark we’re seeing here doesn’t put it all that far off from the mark. This filing number D685,774 suggests Samsungs machine wouldn’t bring on a traditional form for the tablet dock or smartphone itself, on the other hand. The rather interesting differentiator between ASUS’ solution and the Samsung patent filing is the shape of the two components. While the ASUS machine – each of several generations of the Padfone, that is, work with a smartphone that could very well pass off for a stand-alone smartphone without the tablet, Samsung’s device looks a bit more like the letter T. With the top of the smartphone having a swoop outward to the left and to the right, this smartphone fits in with its tablet dock like a glove. The tablet the...

Google has been pushing its VP8 codec for a couple of years now, and together with Vorbis audio encoding, the two codecs are the base of the royalty-free WebM format (also known as RFC 6386) that is designed for use with HTML5 video. However, Nokia isn’t too happy that Google is getting all the attention and has decided to start making some noise. In an official filing with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IEFT), which is responsible for drafting and publishing RFC 6386, Nokia has listed 64 patents and 22 pending patents which it claims pertain to VP8. Some of the patents are for the same idea but in different geographic locations, so Nokia isn’t claiming it has over 80 patents related to VP8, however it is clear that Nokia is trying to put a stop to the codec. In comments to the FOSS patents blog, which covers software patent news, Nokia said it would not commit to royalty-free or fair licensing with respect to VP8. The Finnish company claims that Google are “attempting to fo...