Kodak Getting More Patent Aggressive: In Legal Fight Over Photo Sharing Site
from the oh-come-on dept
About a year ago, we were disappointed to see Kodak start to sue mobile phone companies for patent infringement, wondering if this was a sign of trouble at the company. As we've seen in the past, when big companies start filing patent infringement lawsuits, it's a sign that they're having trouble innovating in the marketplace, so they switch to trying to use the law to hold back competitors. It seems that the company is taking things even further and has sued photo-hosting/sharing site Shutterfly. Years back, you may remember, Kodak bought a similar site, Ofoto, and apparently now it's claiming that only it is allowed to do some rather basic photos hosting site features, such as selling prints or photobooks from the site. Shutterfly has its own patents and has filed a countersuit -- which Kodak called a "litigation tactic." Yeah, it's a litigation tactic: responding to a silly patent lawsuit with a similar one. Problem is, Kodak is the company that kicked off this "litigation tactic."Filed Under: patents, photos, photosharing
Companies: kodak, shutterfly
