PTSC mentioned with SONY
This may be a share price driver, being read about outside of just PR Newswire and Yahoo Finance:
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Patriot Scientific sues Sony, others for patent infringement
December 23, 2003 (6:48 p.m. EST)
By Anthony Cataldo, EE Times
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Intellectual property provider Patriot Scientific Corp. today (Dec. 23) said it filed a lawsuit against Sony Corp. of America and other consumer electronics companies over claims that the companies violated one of its key microprocessor-related patents. The claim is part of a broader effort by Patriot to extract royalties from companies using microprocessors with clock speeds that exceed 120-MHz.
Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the lawsuit against Sony alleges that the Japanese consumer electronics giant makes at least 14 products that infringe Patriot's technology. Among the products are 11 Vaio desktop and laptop computers, DVD equipment and server systems, according to the complaint.
As part of the complaint, Patriot is asking the court for an injunction barring further sales of the products in question along with a discovery hearing to assess damages and royalty payments. All told, the company is seeking damages "in excess of several hundred million dollars" from the group of consumer electronic manufacturers, according statement by Patriot.
Patriot declined to provide the names of the other consumer electronics firms that it says have violated its patent, though it did disclose the case number for the Sony lawsuit. The company acknowledged that Sony was a target after being contacted by EE Times. Calls today to Sony's headquarters went unanswered.
Specifically, Patriot says the companies are violating its 5,809,336 patent. Granted in 1998, the patent describes a microprocessor with a variable speed system clock.
Jeff Wallin, president and chief executive officer of San Diego-based Patriot, said his company tried negotiating with the consumer electronics firms before deciding to file the lawsuit. "There's been dialogue with Sony and others," he said. "We're just trying to protect our rights and our high speed variable clock technology."
Recently, Patriot has made enforcement of its patent portfolio a cornerstone of its business strategy after deciding to emphasize sales of soft intellectual property cores over chips. The company sells a proprietary line of low-power, 32-bit RISC microprocessors called Ignite.
To that end, the company earlier this year set out an "intellectual property compliance program" that targets hundreds of companies using microprocessors that exceed 120-MHz. "We're looking at quite a few companies," Wallin said. "We're approaching this market segment by market segment. We feel there are many companies benefiting from this right now."
