A federal jury on Wednesday awarded $105 million to a Dallas expertise firm that sued X Corp., previously often called Twitter, claiming patent infringement.
The eight-member jury, on its first full day of deliberations, discovered that X willfully infringed one among two patents at problem within the case. Attorneys for the plaintiff, VidStream Inc., which filed the lawsuit in 2016, had requested the jurors to return a verdict of $632.6 million.
The trial started April 7 in Dallas earlier than Chief Decide David C. Godbey of the Northern District of Texas. At trial and in court docket filings, each side and Decide Godbey referred to X by its former, well-known identify.
Attorneys for VidStream and X didn’t return messages in search of remark.
VidStream’s swimsuit alleged that X infringed on patents the Dallas firm holds for a expertise that shortly standardizes user-generated movies, which are available myriad codecs, and converts or “transcodes” them to make them uniformly usable over quite a lot of networks, together with social media platforms, smartphone apps and tv.
The jury started deliberating Tuesday night.
X (then Twitter), the swimsuit alleges, used VidStream’s patented expertise to develop a product for distribution of movies on its website, by means of two video apps it owns, Vine and Periscope, and on different platforms, together with conventional tv.
“It was the coverage at Twitter to not consider or respect one other firm’s patents,” VidStream’s lead lawyer, Bradley Caldwell of Caldwell Cassady & Curry in Dallas, informed the eight-member jury in closing arguments Tuesday.
Sonal N. Mehta of WilmerHale, representing X, countered that her shopper “didn’t infringe any declare on this case.” Twitter’s engineers, she stated, independently developed a comparable solution to facilitate “from-anywhere-to-anywhere expertise,” however one which didn’t depend on VidStream’s patents.
Moreover, she informed the jury, VidStream’s patents are invalid as a result of the corporate’s invention replicates “prior artwork,” publicly recognized details about an invention that predates the submitting date of a patent utility, in methods that aren’t “novel and non-obvious,” key necessities for patentability.
VidStream is the successor-in-interest to Youtoo Applied sciences, which secured the 2 patents in query on Jan. 25, 2015.
Youtoo, the unique plaintiff within the lawsuit, filed for Chapter 7 chapter on Nov. 30, 2017. Within the liquidation of its property, VidStream acquired the patents.
The expertise at problem includes a server system that sends customers’ units directions that impose on movies “predetermined constraints” — governing, for instance, a video’s body fee, size, and backbone — that meet the often-restrictive necessities of platforms that distribute user-generated movies. This in flip simplifies the transcoding of these movies into the completely different codecs utilized by distributing platforms.
Mehta stated the chief objective of Youtoo’s invention was to prepared user-generated movies for broadcast on tv, a medium through which X has no curiosity.
“Twitter needs eyeballs on Twitter, not on tv,” she informed the jury.
Caldwell, VidStream’s lawyer, stated, “Youtoo was not a TV firm,” and its anywhere-to-anywhere expertise was designed to work simply as nicely on different platforms, together with smartphone apps and social media websites equivalent to X.
At one time, each attorneys stated, the businesses have been in talks to kind a partnership, however the deal by no means got here to fruition.
As an alternative, Caldwell stated, Twitter stole Youtoo’s patented invention.
“Twitter wished to place Youtoo as an alternative,” he stated.
Mehta stated that was nonsense. Twitter, she stated, backed out of a partnership as a result of its executives decided that Youtoo was not an excellent match for the social media big. “Youtoo was all about TV,” she stated.
In addition to, she added, “Twitter already had the expertise” wanted to distribute movies by means of its apps.
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