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Microsoft’s new “Flash killer” Silverlight technology has hit a speed bump as revealed in Ina Fried’s report that Gotuit Media filed suit July 2 in San Francisco Federal Court claiming that Silverlight violated several of its patents related to video metadata. Gotuit Media seems to be a real company (one of whose shareholders is Motorola) with real products and apparently the video metadata patents are among the company’s crown jewels. Microsoft says that they have not been served yet and have no comment.
There has been some commentary that Gotuit just wants to cut a piece of Microsoft’s Olympic pie for themselves, but while the Gotuit filing does mention the Olympics as an illustration of the use of video metadata, I see no evidence that they are trying for an immediate injunction before the Olympics start next month. Moreover, the suggested date for the case management conference is in October. None of this means that Gotuit’s claim is valid, but merely that this suit looks like more than a patent troll trying for an easy payday.
