Trademark Wars: ChaCha, XOOM Taken to the Gauntlet
It’s nothing new to hear about patent and trademark infringements in the Android market. Whether it be OEMs or developers, someone’s registered patent or trademark is always being infringed upon. Even Google “stole” Android at some point. That’s been settled with some ridiculous amount of money, of course.
And now HTC and Motorola find themselves in the fire yet again. They’re not new to legal troubles – having had to defend themselves from several hardware and software patent infringements in recent years – so we’re not sure how severe we can consider these cases to be.
HTC sees themselves causing trouble with their HTC ChaCha, one of the two “Facebook” phones introduced at Mobile World Congress last week. I’m sure the folks at ChaCha Search Incorporated aren’t too happy about that. They make a search engine that provides answers to some of the world’s most common questions and have been around for quite some time. I’ve even stumbled across them a few times in my Googlin’.
Then there’s Motorola and the XOOM. They’ve infringed on a lesser-known (at least in the tech world) infringement, but that doesn’t mean they’re in any less trouble. Xoom Corp deals with money transfer, and if they really want to, they could get some money transferred right from Motorola’s Chicagoan bank accounts. (That was an awesome pun, wasn’t it? I’m trademarking that.)
Both companies have already filed an infringement suit. We’ll likely see these cases settled out of court with a big pile of money thrown at the violated companies, but anything could happen. We’ll keep our eyes on this one. [Justia, FOSS Patents via TechCrunch]