Tag Archives: patent

Over the last few years, a company known as ‘Xperi Corporation’ has been throwing patent infringement lawsuits at some of the biggest companies in tech. In 2017, Xperi won a settlement and license agreement with Broadcom and managed to achieve the same result against Samsung in December 2018. Now, Xperi …

Rumours of a Pixel Watch came to a head at the start of the year, as Google acquired Fossil’s smartwatch technology for $40 million. Although the company has yet to make anything official with its Pixel branding, a new patent pertaining to quick changing wristbands shows that Google does intend …

Qualcomm’s second lawsuit against Apple might have been dismissed in Germany, but that hasn’t slowed the chipmaker’s offensive against the company as their patent battles rage on. This time, Qualcomm has stipulated that the iPhone maker owes the company $31 million for its alleged violations. When Apple replaced Qualcomm modems …

In the VR world, there are several companies that license patents from a few big players. The HTC VIVE is built using Valve’s developed technology, meanwhile the Samsung GearVR is built in partnership with Oculus. Now, it looks like Sony is opening up to licensing out its own virtual reality …

Back in 2016, Blackberry transformed itself from a smartphone maker into a software and licensing company. Since then, the former giant has launched lawsuits at the likes of Facebook and Snap. Things on that front have been quiet since, but this week Facebook launched its counter-attack, claiming that Blackberry infringed …

Back in early 2017, we learned that AMD had filed a lawsuit against TV makers, LG and Vizio, in addition to chip suppliers MediaTek and Sigma Designs. In the complaint, AMD said that these companies were infringing on two patents from the ATI days and requested an investigation from the …

We’ve seen Samsung defending its smartphones in the court room plenty of times over the years, but there is always another lawsuit around the corner. This week, a lesser-known US data security firm filed a case against Samsung, claiming that the Galaxy series infringes on biometric authentication patents. PACid is …

Apple has lost in court to VirnetX once again. The two companies have been battling it out in court over various patent cases for 8 years, the most recent case pertains to Apple’s iMessenger and FaceTime technology. Originally, a court ordered Apple to pay out $625 million for misusing patents …

Activision isn’t the only publisher patenting worrying new matchmaking systems designed to raise spending on microtransactions. This week, it came to light that EA has filed for two patents that could impact fair competition in multiplayer games, with one pertaining to Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment and another detailing an ‘Engagement Optimized …

It looks like Apple has another legal matter to add to its ever growing pile of lawsuits. This time around, an Israeli company is suing Apple, claiming that the dual-cameras featured on the iPhone 7 Plus and the iPhone 8 Plus infringe on four patents in total. Corephotonics is the …

Over the last five years, Apple and Samsung have been embroiled in a huge patent lawsuit, with Samsung often ending up on the losing end. At first, Samsung was ordered to pay Apple as much as $1 billion but throughout many appeals, Samsung’s lawyers managed to cut that number down …

Publishers have been putting a lot of time and effort into finding new ways to sell microtransactions to gamers. Some games have managed to get it right, while others have fallen flat and drawn criticism for it. Activision has become the latest example of this, as the publisher recently patented …

After five long years going through the court system, this week a judge ruled that Apple must pay $439.7 million to patent-hoarding firm, VirnetX. The company holds four patents that were apparently infringed on by Apple’s FaceTime software amongst other iOS apps. VirnetX first filed a lawsuit against Apple in …

The Apple Watch has just entered its third generation, bringing better health tracking and LTE capabilities to the table. However, it is already time to look to the future, which could involve self-adjusting watch bands to automatically find the perfect fit for your wrist. Last week, Apple was granted US …

There are a lot of problems associated with drone delivery, from safe landings and take offs, to the family dog attacking it. But a new patent filed by Amazon suggests that dropping parcels by parachute could be a way to alleviate most of the issues and maybe even ditch the …

British Telecom (BT) has announced that it’s taking Valve to court, over what it claims are patent infringements by the longtime game developer and publisher. While there does seem to be some merit to the suit, all of the patents are rather generic, so there will likely be some wiggle …

Last year, Apple revealed its new Force Touch technology, which in its current form allows the company to build completely flat, stiff trackpads that don’t actually press in for a click. Instead, a little engine under the trackpad uses vibrations to simulate the feeling of clicking a trackpad. However, this …

Late last year, we got wind of a couple of patent filings from Nintendo, showing sketches of a new controller, presumably for the upcoming Nintendo NX console. Now, a leaked image appears to show off what the controller looks like in the flesh and much like the sketch, it looks …

Apple is in and out of the court room with lawsuits constantly and while most of the time the company can work its way out of tough situations, this week Apple lost in a video streaming patent case in Germany to OpenTV. Back in 2014, OpenTV filed a lawsuit against …

Microsoft appears to be experimenting with how we build and upgrade computers as the company has patented a new modular PC design, which would be upgraded by ‘stackable’ components. Microsoft is describing this as a “modular computing device” and the patent actually dates quite far back, with it being applied …

Back in 2014, Samsung and Nvidia began battling it out in court over patent infringement. Initially, Nvidia launched a suit against Samsung and Qualcomm over GPU patent infringement, which led to Samsung filing a counter-suit over memory chip technology, which the company has now lost. Originally, Samsung said that the …

We have been hearing a lot about the iPhone 7 these last few weeks along with Apple’s future plans for audio on its flagship smartphone. Following on from reports that Apple is set to kill off the 3.5mm headphone jack to save space, a patent has been uncovered showing off …

File locker website Dropbox has patented a new type of sharing technology that would allow its users to use peer to peer networking to share their Dropbox files and folders with one another without sending them through the company’s servers. Although ostensibly for backup purposes, this system could also make …

While Samsung did finally agree to pay Apple the $550 million over patent infringements, there was one little stipulation, Samsung wants the chance to win some of that money back in court and has filed an appeal with the US Supreme Court in one last effort to prove how ridiculous …

We’ve been hearing a lot of rumours over the last few months regarding Nintendo’s next console, the NX. So far, we have no idea what it is going to be or what features it will bring to the table but we do know that Nintendo has been making some interesting …

Apple is currently facing a pretty big lawsuit in China. One company, known as BYD, filed two separate suits back in May of this year, claiming that the antenna on the iPhone 6 and some other products in Apple’s lineup may infringe on its own patents. BYD has also listed …

Although SSDs have turned some of gaming’s loading screens into frustrating exercises in speed reading the quickly shown tips, not every one is quite so snappy. So perhaps it’s good that an old Namco Bandai patent is about to run its course, as it might mean that developers decide to …

It seems that Apple is looking in to fortifying the displays found on its iPhones in order to tackle one of the biggest problems with smartphones- shattering screens. The company recently filed a patent idea that would use retractable bumpers that will automatically pop out when a device begins to …

Amazon has designed its own pair of augmented reality glasses, judging by a recent patent filing from the company. While many other device makers are currently focussed on virtual reality, there aren’t as many big names currently working on augmented reality, aside from Microsoft with the Hololens and Google with …

The smartphone industry is one that is as rife with innovation as it is with patent lawsuits. Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm and many others have dragged one another in and out of court rooms for the past decade or so, attempting to wrestle money and bans on sales from and against …