The patent-packed Kudelski Group has announced it has reached agreement with Apple in a case alleging violations of how certain products accessed OTT content on smartphones and PCs, but given the prolific track record of the Swiss content security powerhouse, we probably won’t be waiting very long until the next patent dispute emerges.
Kudelski’s OpenTV subsidiary fired the allegations at Apple back in 2014 for violating three of its patents, and following the ruling of a German court in March this year that ruled in favor of OpenTV, Apple was forced to come up with a reasonable deal or risk being forced to disable specific features relating to video streaming on its devices, or remove the infringing products from the market altogether.
The Kudelski Group and its various subsidiaries boasts over 4,500 patents for TV technologies, of which OpenTV has 800, as well as license agreements with giant industry players such as Disney and Google. The industry knows all too well that it doesn’t think twice about using these assets to its advantage, but while Kudelski is often portrayed as the bad guy, the company has invested significantly in its technologies and is simply trying to hunt down companies which have unfairly made money from its inventions – companies such as Apple which thinks it is so powerful that it can get away with it.
Terms of the agreement between Kudelski and Apple have not been revealed, as the statement only noted a “comprehensive patent license agreement,” but Kudelski will have received a tidy sum from the deal, as it has in previous settlements. Swiss financial services firm UBS estimates that Kudelski has received somewhere in the region of $62 million to $83 million from its various patent payments between 2014 and 2016.
Over the past 20 years, companies such as OpenTV within The Kudelski Group have been pioneers in developing many of the technologies that consumer electronics companies, such as Apple, are integrating into its products for delivering video content. This includes numerous patents directed to technologies for video and content management, distribution, information acquisition, sharing, authentication, secure storage, and control.
Just last month Kudelski acquired NexGuard Labs (previously Civolution), which Faultline pointed out at the time almost certainly hints at the beginning of another patent war around watermarking. Kudelski’s Nagra is just one of a handful of companies which now controls a watermarking system and already this year one patent troll, in the guise of US player Blue Spike, has raised an issue around patents relating to watermarks.
The Kudelski Group has gained its recent reputation through an array of acquisitions of tech companies over the years – notably, Lysis, Livewire, MediaGuard, SmarDTV, OpenTV, Conax, and most recently, NexGuard Labs.
Kudelski’s Open TV has been diligently pursuing patent legal actions against large US firms including Verizon, AOL, Apple, Cisco, Netflix and Google, and it could now add Apple to its list of settlements which also includes Google, Yahoo, Cisco and Netflix.
The patent agreement with Yahoo in May this year involved Yahoo making a one-time up-front license fee payment to Kudelski and all allegations were dismissed. It was in January when Kudelski used its Open TV patents to claim that Yahoo was infringing in Yahoo Smart TV, Yahoo Connected TV, Yahoo TV, Yahoo interactive video advertisements, Yahoo fantasy gaming, and Yahoo Screen, but it never gave details of those patents.
The case with Verizon was settled in February, with both parties dismissing all pending patent litigation. The patent claims it had against Verizon were for FiOS TV, some advertising functions and OTT streaming services patents used at both Verizon and AOL.
Apple and Broadcom have just submitted counterclaims against the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), refuting the allegations of patent infringements relating to the 802.11n wireless standard. Dot 23 Technologies, a Texas-based non-practicing entity, has decided to dismiss the patent lawsuit it had against Apple which claimed Siri infringed voice recognition and dialing patents, the two companies have agreed to settle the dispute out of court.
The group’s cybersecurity arm Kudelski Security announced its entrance into the US this week at the Black Hat USA cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, with the aim of helping its clients “address their most complex security challenges.” The Kudelski Security division was born from the acquisition of Milestone Systems, and it has partnerships with cybersecurity technology companies including F5, Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, and RSA.
With the Kudelski Group increasing its presence in the US, it has declared it will be reporting its financial results in US dollars for the first time, beginning as of its 2017 fiscal year.