The Kudelski Group is no stranger to patent infringement court cases, and this week its OpenTV subsidiary has returned fire against Yahoo by filing ten US patent infringements, following Yahoo’s complaint for a declaratory judgement against the middleware company back in January.
The alleged infringements comprise the products and services Yahoo Smart TV, Yahoo Connected TV, Yahoo TV, Yahoo interactive video advertisements, Yahoo fantasy gaming, and Yahoo Screen – details on specific technologies have not yet been disclosed. This certainly comes at an inconvenient period for Yahoo amid reports of frantic bidding for assets from the likes of Verizon, Google, and the Daily Mail (see separate story this week).
The Kudelski Group has gained quite a reputation in patent litigation through an array of acquisitions of tech companies over the years – notably, Lysis, Livewire, MediaGuard, SmarDTV, OpenTV, and most recently, Conax.
Yahoo’s original filing in a Californian court involved the company looking to invalidate a patent and prove it was not in infringement of seven more of OpenTV’s patents – relating to interactive TV, security, and sports trivia quizzes.
Yahoo claimed its sports platforms are not in violation due to the way participants are grouped, and also highlighted that one patent used the term “broadcast program,” yet Yahoo stressed it is classified as an internet platform. Yahoo has pursued its defense by seeking to invalidate a patent relating to security measures for interactive TV applications – claiming that the process doesn’t require any computing so therefore is not a resolution to a technological or mechanical issue.
The Swiss powerhouse and its various subsidiaries boasts over 4,500 patents for TV technologies, of which OpenTV has 800, as well as license agreements with industry players such as Disney and Google, and doesn’t think twice about using these to its advantage in cases such as the three suits filed against Netflix in three years.
In November 2015, we reported on Kudelski subsidiaries OpenTV and Nagra suing Verizon and its recently acquired subsidiary AOL, in a suit claiming seven patent infringements in its FiOS TV services, FiOS TV Everywhere, Redbox Instant (an SVoD service that is now shut down), and Go90, as well as AOL’s Spot On advertising and streaming video services. In February, a cross-licensing agreement was settled between the involved parties, cancelling all infringement filings – terms of the deal were not revealed.
Apple, Cisco, Netflix, and Google have all come up against the brunt of OpenTV’s patent portfolio, enforced strongly by the Kudelski Group – although these cases were also all settled in cross licensing deals. Yahoo will likely want to settle this dispute as efficiently as possible given its current financial turmoil.
After Yahoo launched Yahoo Connected TV in 2009, it was slow to push the technology to set makers and get more content sources and apps, then several factors caused Yahoo’s TV premise to flounder, leading to extensive reorganization at the company. Such as Microsoft’s attempt to acquire it, the change of CEOs, the $42 million loss from investing in programs Community, Sin City Saints and Other Space, as well as the poor marketing campaigns (a lot of people had no idea Yahoo even had a TV service). As news of Yahoo’s situation unfolds, information may surface about the fate of its TV assets – as it stands, Verizon is the front runner.