Pandora Media signed an agreement with Acacia Research...
Pandora Media signed an agreement with Acacia Research subsidiary Unified Messaging Solutions to resolve all disputes between the companies pending in U.S. District Court in Wilmington, Del., Acacia said in an SEC filing Monday. Unified sued Pandora Jan. 15, claiming…
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the online music service violated U.S. Patents 6,857,074; 7,836,141; 7,895,313; and 7,934,148. Unified is the exclusive licensee of all four patents, each entitled “Systems and methods for storing, delivering, and managing messages,” it said. Pandora “committed indirect infringement through its inducing and/or contributing to the infringements of its customers via storing, delivering, and managing messages” through the operation of the Pandora Web-based communications services, the suit claimed. Pandora “has known or should have known that its actions would induce or contribute to actual infringement by its customers,” Unified claimed. The complaint didn’t mention that Unified was an Acacia subsidiary. The SEC filing didn’t give terms of the settlement and Acacia declined to provide that information. Pandora declined to comment on the settlement. An unspecified Acacia subsidiary, meanwhile, bought patents for content security used in consumer electronics and mobile devices including smartphones, tablets and laptops from an unspecified “major semiconductor technology company,” Acacia said in a news release Monday. Acacia declined to name the subsidiary, the company the patents were purchased from, or say how much they cost. A growing number of “major technology companies” are selecting Acacia as their partner for the licensing of their patented technologies, said CEO Paul Ryan. “We continue to grow our base of future revenues by adding new patent portfolios.” Acacia sued many companies before Pandora for patent infringement, including DirecTV, EchoStar, Charter Communications, Comcast and Cox Communications, as well as several pornography websites. More recently, Acacia sued Huawei and ZTE alleging infringement of Access Co.’s PalmSource patents in a dispute that’s scheduled for trial in mid-2014 in U.S. District Court in Marshall, Texas, Acacia President Matthew Vella said recently. Acacia reached agreement with Access in 2010 to license PalmSource patents to cellphone suppliers and has since generated “in the nine digits” of gross revenue through settlements and licensing pacts, he said.