LG has filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission this week, asking the ITC to block the import of the Sony PlayStation 3.
The company is claiming that the Blu-ray drive in every PS3 console violates multiple LG patents.
Sony, Sony Corporation of America, Sony Electronics, Sony Computer Entertainment and Sony Computer Entertainment America are all cited in the complaint, says Cnet.
The patents in question relate to “the way a Blu-ray player reproduces data from a Blu-ray disc” and how it “reproduces multiple data streams by way of multiple camera angles.”
Finally, LG says Sony is violating a patent relating to the display of subtitles in Blu-ray films.
LG’s choice, over 1500 days after the PS3 launched in the U.S., seems like a direct retaliation for Sony’s complaint filed with the ITC late last year over patent violations in mobile phones.
Result for: streams
Intel has said this weekend that it will sue anyone who uses the HDCP “Master Key” that was recently leaked to the Web.
The crypto key can be used to break the HDCP tech that limits users from recording digital TV streams and Blu-ray discs.
The technology giant, which developed HDCP, says: “There are laws to protect both the intellectual property involved as well as the content that is created and owned by the content providers. Should a circumvention device be created using this information, we and others would avail ourselves, as appropriate, of those remedies.”
Earlier in the week, Intel confirmed that the “master key” was authentic, and could be used to break the content protection scheme.
The HDCP master key, which is 28200 letters and numbers, can be used to create “device keys,” thus making all current and future devices “HDCP-free” given the right hardware.
It is unclear how the “master key” was deciphered, but Paul Kocher, the chief scientist at Cryptography Research, gives a possible reason. Kocher says “somebody in the business of making HDCP-compatible devices, who had access to at least 50 individual device keys, would have been able to reconstruct the master key by analyzing “mathematical similarities” in the individual device keys.”
Result for: streams
Arstechnica is reporting today that RealVideo continues its death spiral, this time with C-SPAN getting rid of the streaming video format in favor of Flash and Windows Media.
Says the C-SPAN site: “Due to lack of demand for the RealVideo format, we will be retiring our links to C-SPAN live video streams in the RealVideo format effective March 1, 2010.”
The Ars reporter says the codec lives on in a few Government committees, such as the Senate’s Committee on Environment and Public Works but the FCC finally upgraded last year to Flash, after previously broadcasting all their meetings on a server that could handle only up to 200 users and produced 240×240 resolution video.
