In a move reminiscent of patent assertion entities (PAEs, or, more pithily, “patent trolls”) Samsung bought two of the patents it is using to accuse Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) of infringing on its intellectual property rights. According to The Verge, and the records of the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO), Samsung acquired the more important patent in 2010 for a price of $2.39 million, purchasing it from the Hitachi Corporation. A secondary patent related to photo galleries was bought for an unspecified lesser sum.
The first patent, U.S. Patent #5,579,239, was originally granted to Hitachi in November of 1996. The inventors of record include three individuals from Tulsa, Oklahoma – Mitchael C. Freeman, Richard C. Freeman, and Chad Boss – and one from Liberty Mounds, Oklahoma – Michael H. Freeman. The patent is entitled “Remote Video Transmission System” and concerns sending a compressed audio and video signal over telephone lines or via radio signals.
Samsung claims that this newly-bought patent has been systematically violated by Apple’s (AAPL) FaceTime, which they claim is based entirely on the obscure Hitachi patent. The Korean firm is seeking damages of over $6 million for the alleged infringements. If Apple did indeed draw inspiration from the patent, they took a long time to capitalize on it. FaceTime was introduced in 2010, some 14 years after the original patent was granted, and was not used through cellular links until 2 years later in 2012, with the launch of iOS 6.
The second patent, for which Samsung is seeking less than $200,000 in damages, was another Hitachi document, originally granted on May 1st, 2001. U.S. Patent #6,226,449 was given the name “Apparatus For Recording and Reproducing Digital Image and Speech.” Listing Hisashi Inoue, Keiji Nagayama, and Tomishige Yatsugi as the inventors, this patent covers methods of sorting and displaying “JPEGs” and video objects. In effect, it is a rather puffed up file and folder system. The alleged infringement is Apple’s use of the camera roll for storing pictures and media.
Apple’s lawyers were quick to counter with the information that all of the patents they are suing Samsung over were developed entirely in-house, not bought from a third party specifically to serve as weapons in a particular lawsuit. This fact is objectively true and easily verified.
Though Apple (AAPL) is not above “borrowing” ideas from other firms, in this case, it appears that the patents Samsung is invoking are so old that they belong to another era and a different technological world. A sixteen year gap between patenting and implementation is an eternity in the fast-developing technology sector, and logically indicates that there is no connection at all. Coupled with the generic character of both patents, and the fact that they have been used exclusively to prove that Apple is infringing on something, this critical factor gives a high probability that Samsung’s accusations are largely frivolous and simply meant to cloud the issue in juror’s minds by portraying Apple as ripping off Samsung also.