Emblaze sues Microsoft, says iPad subject to Apple suit
updated 01:50 pm EST, Wed February 10, 2010
Emblaze says IIS as guilty as iPod of infringing
Emblaze today sued Microsoft for allegedly violating the same patents that resulted in a lawsuit against Apple late last year. The Israeli patent holder believes that Microsoft's IIS Smooth Streaming, an important ingredient behind both Silverlight and the 1080p movies at the Zune Video Marketplace, infringes on the same patents for device-to-device media streaming.
Microsoft hasn't commented on the new lawsuit but has until March 15th to provide a response in court.
As part of its lawsuit, Emblaze also lumped the iPad into its existing complaint against Apple, which had primarily targeted the iPhone, iPod and Mac OS X Snow Leopard.
Emblaze is believed to be using the lawsuits as a way of leveling the competitive playing field for its own upcoming phone, the ELSE INTUITION; it's being pitched as a high-end media phone and so will have to compete against hardware or services offered by Apple and Microsoft. Whether or not it has an argument against either of the target companies is unclear as Apple's HTTP live streaming, at the heart of the original lawsuit, is based on the universal HTML5 standard and relatively little technology of Apple's own.
