As Originally Posted to The Wall Street Journal
Cable programmer Discovery Communications Inc. filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Amazon.com Inc., claiming Discovery owns a patent to technology used in Amazon's Kindle electronic-book reader.
The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Delaware, cites a patent to an encryption system for e-books and asks for triple damages as well as a "continuing royalty" on the system.
The popularity of the Kindle, which allows users to download books, contributed to Discovery's decision to bring suit against Amazon rather than against the makers of other e-book readers, such as Sony Corp., people close to Discovery said.
"The Kindle and Kindle 2 are important and popular content delivery systems," Joseph A. LaSala Jr., Discovery's general counsel, said in a statement. "We believe they infringe our intellectual property rights, and that we are entitled to fair compensation."
Amazon declined to comment on the lawsuit. Sony declined to comment on the suit but said that in general it wants its e-book device to be an open platform. Right now, it supports a variety of formats.
The Kindle, released in 2007, is just the latest piece of mobile technology to be the subject of a patent dispute in recent years. "The courts are, as always, trying to keep up with the rapid change in technology. There are a lot of disputes now about what is even patentable," said Edward Reines, an intellectual-property litigator at the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP.
The patent named in Discovery's suit, for an "electronic book security and copyright protection system," was filed in 1999 and awarded to Discovery in 2007, according to online records from the U.S. Patent and Trade Office.
In the 1990s, Discovery founder John Hendricks led research at his company into digital delivery of television and book content, filing for several patents in those areas, according to patent-office records. In 2004, the company sold about 20 patents relating to TV to a consortium of cable operators, according to people close to Discovery.
Amazon spent three years developing the Kindle. Part of the Kindle's initial edge over competitors has been its connection, via cellular data network, to the Amazon bookstore, enabling users to browse and buy books directly from the Kindle rather than from a regular computer.
Amazon has been protective of its proprietary e-book format. Last week, the company asked a Web site to take down instructions on how to run a program that could enable a Kindle device to display books from other e-book providers.
