The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
ruled in favor of InterTrust last Monday in a patent interference proceeding
between it and Macrovision, thereby maintaining the status quo in DRM patent
primacy.
An interference proceeding is an investigation of two patents with similar
claims that were filed around the same time, on the basis that the differences
in filing dates may have reflected administrative processes and therefore may
not accurately represent which party actually invented first. The outcome
of an interference proceeding is a determination of who really got there first.
At issue in this case, which was initiated in
October 2003,
is a 1998 patent that Macrovision bought from a defunct DRM startup called
MediaDNA: U.S. Patent No. 5,845,281, "Method and system for managing a data
object so as to comply with predetermined conditions for usage." MediaDNA
filed its patent on January 31, 1996, two weeks before InterTrust filed several
patents on DRM.
Another
interference proceeding between the two companies, filed in January 2004 and
covering continuations of the patents in question, remains unresolved.
Had Macrovision prevailed in this case, it may well have undone the
interference proceeding's primary raison d'etre: InterTrust's patent
lawsuit
settlement
with Microsoft, which ran to US $440 Million in InterTrust's
favor. The prevailing opinion is that InterTrust initiated this interference
proceeding to help ensure that Macrovision, a strategic partner of Microsoft in
CD copy protection and other areas, would not undermine InterTrust's litigation
against Microsoft.
Macrovision
stresses that its patents on DRM are unchallenged in jurisdictions outside
of the U.S., including Europe and Japan. That is because Europe and Japan
decide patent primacy based solely on filing dates, not on evidence of the dates
of actual invention.
IE 7
Firefox 2.0
