Apple wins DRM patent lawsuit against ContentGuard

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By Larry Banks

Apple has just won a legal battle involving digital rights management (DRM) intellectual property owned by ContentGuard, a subsidiary of Pendrell Corp that sued the iPhone maker for infringing on give patents.

Apple wins ContentGuard DRM lawsuit

The verdict was handed down by a jury in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas on Friday, which found that Apple did not infringe give DRM-related patents that were owned by ContentGuard, according to Reuters.

The claim was that Apple had illegally applied patented DRM technologies to its digital content services such as music, movies and TV shows that are sold through iTunes, as well as e-books sold in the iBooks app. Apple denied the claims.

The decision on Friday comes after ContentGuard went on a fishing expedition to leverage its patents against large tech companies in 2013, including Amazon, Motorola and Samsung. Google and its music and movie digital stores were also added to the list of defendants last year.

ContentGuard has however had only limited success so far. Apart from a favourable decision from the US Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board earlier this year, which prompted Amazon to settle a month later, the patent holder has lost cases against both Google and Samsung.

ContentGuard is now owned by Pendrell and Time Warner, and is the result of a DRM partnership between Microsoft and Xerox that was struck in the year 2000.

SOURCE: AppleInsider.

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