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 â€" 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.