Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Portable GPS car navigation systems maker TomTom has hit back at Microsoft, filing a suit in which it alleges that the Redmond-based company's Streets and Trips software has violated four of its patents.
In the last week of February, Microsoft filed a suit alleging patent violation by TomTom and cited eight patents, three of which were to do with TomTom's implementation of the Linux kernel.
The four patents cited in the suit filed by TomTom are:
US Patent 6,600,994: Quick selection of destinations in an automobile navigation system; and
US Patent 6,542,814: Methods and apparatus for dynamic point of interest display.
The suit was filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on March 19 and seeks to stop Microsoft from producing Streets and Trips. It also seeks damages which have not been specified.
Horacio Gutierrez, the corporate vice-president and deputy general counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing for Microsoft, said in a statement: "We are reviewing TomTom's filing, which we have just received. As has been the case for more than a year, we remain committed to a licensing solution, although we will continue to press ahead with the complaints we initiated in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington and the International Trade Commission."
If TomTom were to come to an agreement with Microsoft over the suit which Microsoft filed, then that would preclude the company from using the Linux kernel in its GPS devices.
According to section 7 of the GPL version 2, "...if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program."
The Linux kernel is released under the GPLv2.
There has been some speculation that Microsoft filed its complaint as a means of getting TomTom to either violate the GPL or else license Windows as the operating system for its GPS devices.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
