NTP Quickly Rubs Off On Visto

from the legal-eagles dept

Thu, Dec 15th 2005 10:00am — Carlo Longino

Just a day after licensing NTP's push email patents, (and NTP taking a stake in the company), Visto is suing Microsoft for -- yep, you guessed it -- patent infringement. To be fair, though, Visto's sued on its own before, filing similar suit against rivals Seven and Smartner, but it sounds like it might be in a similar position to NTP in regards to the Patent Office, with some of its claims being rejected in an initial review by the USPTO. What's that saying about birds of a feather?

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3 Comments

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Mousky, 15 Dec 2005 @ 10:15am

Litigation versus Innovation
No coincidence that Visto signs a licensing deal with NTP, NTP buys a stake in Visto and Visto goes to sue Microsoft, all in a matter of days. Welcome to patent soap opera. Lets litigate rather than innovate.
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Craig Burnham, 15 Dec 2005 @ 12:20pm

Coincidence indeed
Anyone with any sort of intelligence could tell you that whats going on with NTP and Visto is not a coincidence. At least the US patent system is setup in a way to prevent things like this from happening.....

Oh wait
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- Anonymous Coward, 15 Dec 2005 @ 1:22pm
  
  Trend is growing
  this trend of patent trolls sueing for millions/billions of dollars is getting ridiculous quick.. is there any end in site? when do you think it really began? i think software restrictive patents on common codecs/compression (divx, mp3, etc) is the first time it ever struck me as holding inovation back
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