Kodak Sues Apple, HTC over Patents

KOMPAS.com - Embattled photographic company Eastman Kodak has filed patent-infringement lawsuits against Apple and HTC claiming the smartphone makers are infringing several of its digital-imaging inventions.

The lawsuits, filed Tuesday in the US federal court, claim that some of Apple's iPhones, iPads and iPods and HTC's smartphones and tablet devices infringe four Kodak patents related to image transmission.

In its documents, Kodak said it obtained its patents after concluding it would be desirable for people to easily share pictures from their digital cameras without first transferring them to personal computers.It also lodged complaints against Taiwan-based HTC and Apple before the US International Trade Commission, a trade-dispute arbiter in Washington, DC.

In addition, Kodak accuses HTC of infringing the same image-preview technology at the heart of a two-year-old dispute pending before the commission with Apple and the BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion (RIM). The embattled photography pioneer is trying to negotiate a licensing deal with Apple and RIM it estimates could be worth up to US$1 billion.