Ever heard of a company known as Copytele before? Well, you might read more about them in the limelight from now on, as they being a company that specializes in patent monetization and patent assertion, has just announced that their wholly owned subsidiary, Web Conference Encryption Corporation, has filed a patent infringement lawsuit in the Federal District Court against Microsoft Corporation. The whole reason behind this lawsuit? They claim that encryption technology which was developed in-house all the way back in 1999 and is being used by Microsoft’s Skype video conferencing service even as you read this.
Should Copytele manage to walk away from this patent infringement lawsuit as the winner, this could very well be a landmark case that sets a new precedent for other conferencing services, ranging from WebX to FaceTime, and I am quite sure that those behind WebX and FaceTime would keep their fingers crossed that Microsoft would emerge the victor here, otherwise Copytele would get fat simply by obtaining a percentage of the generated annual revenues which have been estimated to exceed $4 billion annually.