In a twist on the classic David and Goliath formula, Web giant Yahoo is suing Menlo Park, Calif., start-up Xfire for patent infringement. The basis of the complaint, filed last week in a U.S. District Court in Northern California and served on Xfire representatives two days ago, alleges that Xfire is willfully infringing on a patent controlled by Yahoo. The patent, referred to as the '125 patent for the last three numbers of U.S. Patent No. 6,699,125, was granted to two then-Yahoo employees, Brian Gottlieb and Chris Kirmse, on March 2, 2004. As is typical, ownership of inventions by employees remains with the corporation the employees work for. Such ownership rights are usually sealed in hiring contracts signed by employees when they're hired.

Posted by GEN-ERIC at 12:07:09 am into the following categories: In The News

---

http://gen-eric.com/patents/htsrv/trackback.php/91

Name:

Email: (not displayed on this site)

Site/Url:

Comment text:

Allowed XHTML tags: <p, ul, ol, li, dl, dt, dd, address, blockquote, ins, del, a, span, bdo, br, em, strong, dfn, code, samp, kdb, var, cite, abbr, acronym, q, sub, sup, tt, i, b, big, small>

URLs, email, AIM and ICQs will be converted automatically.

Options:
Auto-BR (Line breaks become <br />)
Remember me (Set cookies for name, email & url)