Bits Blog: Intertrust Sues Apple, Charging Patent Violations

Intertrust, a company that nabbed a huge settlement over patents in a lawsuit with Microsoft nearly a decade ago, has turned its focus to Apple, suing the technology giant on Wednesday and charging infringements of its security and content protection patents.

Intertrust, which is largely owned by Sony and Philips, sued Apple in Federal District Court in the Northern District of California, claiming it violated more than a dozen patents throughout its product lines, including the iPhone, Apple TV, iPad, iPod and Macintosh computers. Intertrust is best known as an early developer of digital rights management technologies — software that is used to prevent unauthorized access to music, movies, apps and other forms of electronic content.

In its complaint, Intertrust alleges that the security technology used on Apple devices infringes its patents, which have titles like “Techniques for Defining, Using and Manipulating Rights Management Data Structures”; “Systems and Methods Using Cryptography to Protect Secure Computing Environments”; and “Systems and Methods for Secure Transaction Management and Electronic Rights Protection.”

“No other entity uses Intertrust technologies so extensively at so many levels of its enterprise,” the company said in its complaint.

Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman, declined to comment, citing the company’s policy of not commenting on pending litigation.

Apple and other big technology companies with deep pockets are often targets for patent lawsuits (and sometimes initiators of them). A particular irritant to these tech companies is a class of plaintiffs pejoratively called “patent trolls,” which dedicate most of their energies to suing rather than making products.

But Intertrust does not quite fit that profile. The company has been around since the early 1990s, went public in the late 1990s and was taken private in 2003 through a deal that resulted in Sony and Philips owning the vast majority of the company. The company has teams of programmers that work on security software and services, according to Talal Shamoon, chief executive of Intertrust.

“We have a very focused mission around trust and security and around open platforms,” Mr. Shamoon said. “We’re not a troll by any stretch of the imagination.”

Litigation is also rare for Intertrust, which previously has sued only one other company, Microsoft, for patent infringement, according to Mr. Shamoon. That lawsuit resulted in a $440 million settlement from Microsoft in 2004. Intertrust has reached patent licensing agreements with Adobe, HTC, Samsung and others.

Mr. Shamoon said he had sought to negotiate similar licensing deals with Apple for years but the conversations never went anywhere. “You have a culture over there where they see the courtroom as an extension of the conference room,” he said.

“I have a lot of respect for the company,” Mr. Shamoon added. “I’ve been using their equipment for years. But you can’t be the only person on earth who ever invented anything.”

Mr. Shamoon said that Sony and Philips had not directed Intertrust to go after Apple in court to further their own strategic objectives. “This is not some proxy war between big companies,” he said.

Bits Blog: F.T.C. Fines Google $22.5 Million for Safari Privacy Violations

Boris Roessler/European Pressphoto Agency

SAN FRANCISCO — The Federal Trade Commission fined Google $22.5 million on Thursday to settle charges that it had bypassed privacy settings in Apple’s Safari browser to be able to track users of the browser and show them advertisements, and violated an earlier privacy settlement with the agency.

The fine is the largest civil penalty ever levied by the commission, which has been cracking down on tech companies for privacy violations and is also investigating Google for antitrust violations.

“The social contract has to be that if you’re going to hold on to people’s most private data, you have to do a better job of honoring your privacy commitments,” said David C. Vladeck, the director of the commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, in a call with reporters. “And if there’s a message the commission is trying to send today, it’s that.”

The commission said Google had broken the terms of a 2011 settlement over privacy missteps related to the Buzz, a social networking tool now defunct. In the settlement Thursday, Google did not admit to violating the law.

A commissioner, J. Thomas Rosch, filed a dissenting statement because he said the commission should not have accepted Google’s denial of liability, which he called “inexplicable.”

Google has said its actions had been unintentional and had resulted from a change in Safari of which Google was unaware. When the issue was brought to the company’s attention, it said, it stopped tracking Safari users and showing them personalized ads.

On the call with reporters, Mr. Vladeck said he had little patience with Google’s explanation, and referred to other privacy violations about which Google has also said it was unaware, like collecting personal data with its Street View cars.

“As a regulator, it is hard to know which answer is worse — I didn’t know or I did it deliberately,” Mr. Vladeck said. “We hope that the civil penalty we’re imposing here today and continued monitoring of Google’s performance by the commission and by others frankly will force Google to have a better sense of what’s going on.”

Some analysts have questioned the commission’s power to effectively police tech companies, which have repeatedly settled privacy violations with the commission. The fine, though large by commission standards, is small for Google. An investigation by ProPublica, published in Wired magazine in June, said federal regulators did not have enough financing or the legal authority to sufficiently monitor and punish tech companies for privacy violations.

Google and other advertising companies use cookies, which are small files that contain information about Web users, to show personalized ads as Internet users travel around the Web. If an Internet user visits fashion Web sites, for instance, Google might show the person ads for clothing companies on other Web sites that person visits.

Safari, unlike other browsers, blocks cookies from ad networks like Google’s. But Google had been exploiting a loophole to avoid the block, install cookies and track Safari users to show them personalized ads.

In a statement, Google said, “We set the highest standards of privacy and security for our users.” The company added that it had “taken steps to remove the ad cookies, which collected no personal information, from Apple’s browsers.”