Alcatel-Lucent faces LG and Apple in patent trial
Battle starts as technology giants argue over copyright infringements and royalty payments
Apple and LG Electronics infringed an Alcatel-Lucent unit's patents for electronic devices including phones and computers, a lawyer said at the start of a trial.
The jury trial, which began on Tuesday in federal court in San Diego, stems from a 2010 lawsuit by the Paris-based company's Multimedia Patent Trust accusing Apple and LG of copying video-compression technology that allows data to be sent more efficiently over communications media, including the internet and satellites, or stored on DVDs and Blu-ray discs.
"Apple and LG have chosen not to license these patents while 33 other companies have paid over US$190 million for these licences," Frederick Lorig, a lawyer for the patent trust, told the jury. He said the trust was unable to negotiate a licence with Apple "even though a company as prominent as Motorola is paying US$18 million to licence the patents. And Apple sells four times the number of infringing products that Motorola does".
The trust claims its patents are infringed by products including multiple versions of Apple's iPhone, iPod, iPad and MacBook, as well as LG's Chocolate Touch VX8575, Bliss UX700, Touch AX8575, Lotus Elite LX610, Mystique UN610 and Samba LG8575.
"The motion pictures you see on your screens are made possible by these patents," Lorig said. "This technology lets you download in half the time and store twice as much content."
Lawyers for Apple and LG Electronics told jurors that their companies had already paid the Multimedia Patent Trust for the technology covered by the patents from an industry-wide "pay-as-you-go" pool.