Jury Selection to Begin Next Month in Forgent's DVR Patent Lawsuit

Jury selection will begin May 14th in a patent lawsuit that was filed in July, 2005 in the Eastern District of Texas by Forgent Networks against 15 companies that it claims have infringed upon a US DVR patent (#6,285,746) which it holds and which expires May 21st, 2011. The defendants in the case include Cable One, Charter, Comcast, Cox, Time Warner, EchoStar, DirecTV and their respective subsidiaries. Like Acacia Media Technologies, which has met with some success in using the threat of litigation to convince companies in the VOD space to license a portfolio of VOD patents that it holds, Forgent specializes in acquiring and then enforcing patents. However, the '746 patent describes technology which the company developed in-house when it did business under the brand, VTEL.

Forgent has previously met with some success in enforcing a patent for the JPEG compression format which it acquired, and it claims that its licensing program has generated over $100 million in revenues from companies in Asia, Europe and the US. The DVR patent in question in the new litigation describes a computer-controlled video system that allows playback during recording: during playback, the system reads the video content from the storage component, the company says. The patent was filed in 1991; however, the original filing was abandoned, and the company re-filed it in 2002. In September, 2005 Scientific-Atlanta and Motorola filed a complaint against Forgent in the Eastern District of Texas, Tyler Division.

Originally Published: April 16, 2007 in [itvt] Issue 7.26 Part 1

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