Alcatel-Lucent trust sues Apple, others over video patents

The Alcatel-Lucent backed Multimedia Patent Trust (MPT) has filed a law suit against Apple, Canon, LG Electronics and TiVo accusing them of infringing its patents on video compression.

The lawsuit was filed on Monday at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. In the case of Apple, MPT is looking for royalty payments on "all video-capable products sold by Apple" that infringe on its patents, including Apple's MacBook laptops, iPhone smartphones and its Final Cut Software, according to the filing.

All four patents mentioned in the filing are related to video codecs, which are used to reduce the amount of data used to represent a digital video signal.

The trust also wants royalty payments for cameras and camcorders sold by Canon, digital video recorders sold by TiVo, and smartphones sold by LG.

Lawsuits involving smartphones are becoming a common occurrence. Last week, Nokia expanded its lawsuit against Apple, which in turn has countersued the Finnish phone maker. Apple is also involved in patent-related legal battles with HTC and Motorola.

The MPT was established at the time of the merger between Alcatel and Lucent Technologies in 2006, and Lucent assigned some of its patent portfolio to MPT. While MPT now owns and controls those assets, the proceeds go to Alcatel-Lucent. MPT has in the past been involved in lawsuits with Microsoft, among others.

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