San
Francisco – The patent-infringement suits just keep on coming in the cellphone
market.
This time, Dolby Laboratories
sued Research In Motion in the U.S. and Germany, seeking financial damages and an injunction on the sale of BlackBerry
smartphones and the Playbook tablet.
Dolby contends the devices infringe on Dolby patents involving digital audio
compression technologies that have been licensed
by all other major cellphone makers. The patents deliver high-quality audio using “extremely
limited amounts of transmission and/or storage space,” Dolby said.
The patented
technologies have been
incorporated into the international standard called High Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE AAC), which compressed digital audio
to less
than 10 percent of its original
digital file size,
Dolby said.
Lawsuits were filed in the U.S.
District Court for the Northern District of California and, in Germany, in the District Court
of Mannheim.
Just yesterday, Nokia and Apple
,
but Apple’s disputes with Motorola, Samsung and HTC are still outstanding.
