Kindling Patent Litigation

As if Amazon hasn't had enough troubles lately with its Kindle 2 product, it has now been sued for patent infringement of this patent by Discovery Communications. The patent in question was filed for in 1999 and issued in 2007.

Here's the abstract:

The invention, electronic book security and copyright protection system, provides for secure distribution of electronic text and graphics to subscribers and secure storage. The method may be executed at a content provider's site, at an operations center, over a video distribution system or over a variety of alternative distribution systems, at a home subsystem, and at a billing and collection system. The content provider or operations center and/or other distribution points perform the functions of manipulation and secure storage of text data, security encryption and coding of text, cataloging of books, message center, and secure delivery functions. The home subsystem connects to a secure video distribution system or variety of alternative secure distribution systems, generates menus and stores text, and transacts through communicating mechanisms. A portable book-shaped viewer is used for secure viewing of the text. A billing system performs the transaction, management, authorization, collection and payments utilizing the telephone system or a variety of alternative communication systems using secure techniques.

Here's the story.

This comes at more or less the same time as Amazon is invoking the DMCA against an entity that provides software to enable the use of ebooks from other vendors on its Kindle products.

Who was it who said something about promoting "the progress of science and useful arts"?

HK