Suits Against Akamai, Google, and Netflix Added to One of the Longest Ongoing Litigation Campaigns

Personalized Media Communications, LLC (PMC) has added yet more lawsuits to its long-running litigation campaign, suing Akamai (2:19-cv-00089), Alphabet (Google) (2:19-cv-00090), and Netflix (2:19-cv-00091) in the Eastern District of Texas. With these new complaints, which allege infringement of six patents (with all six at issue against Google and Netflix; five of the six, against Akamai), five of them for the first time in litigation, over 30 patents have now been asserted in PMC’s campaign. The patents belong to a large family, generally related to digital signal processing, with these most recent infringement allegations directed to media playback features within the defendants’ products and services, including a video progress bar and the user interface’s display of a thumbnail corresponding to a playback location on that progress bar; the decryption of encrypted video content; the distribution of media content from multiple storage locations and based on the selected media content; buffering; and the use of content distribution networks (CDNs).