Apple and nearly three dozen other companies were slapped with a patent infringement lawsuit yesterday over technology used to differentiate between legitimate and spam email messages. The suit, being pursued by apparent patent troll InNova Patent Licensing, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in Marshall, which is considered to one of the most friendly courts for those pursuing patent infringement cases.
Among the other tech companies included in the lawsuit are Google, Dell, HP, IBM, and Yahoo, as well as non-tech companies such as JC Penney, Dr. Pepper Snapple, and Bank of America.
It is unclear from the press release exactly how Apple and the other defendants are claimed to have infringed the patent. The patent, however, describes methods for storing "context information" associated with an email address, such as the person's real name and business affiliation, in a database. Recipients' email applications could then automatically access the database when a message arrives, providing identification information on the sender. The database would render it unnecessary for senders to specify certain email header fields such as adding a real name to the "From" field or adding a signature to each email message, while also serving as an aid to separate emails sent by known or otherwise legitimate senders from those sent by spammers.
Article Link: Apple, Google, and Others Hit With Patent Lawsuit Over Spam Email Identification
