Last November, MZ Audio Sciences, LLC sued Sony in the District of Delaware over a single patent generally related to “embedding data in an audio signal”. After a couple of extensions pushed the deadline for Sony to respond to that complaint into March, the plaintiff filed a notice of voluntary dismissal on the date of its new complaint, filed before the Central District of California (2:22-cv-00866). As a consequence, MZ Audio was required to disclose any third parties having an interest in the outcome of the litigation, here including litigation counsel and a “capital provider”.

Sony (1:21-cv-01663) has been sued in the District of Delaware by an entity created in that state this past April, MZ Audio Sciences, LLC. A single patent generally related to “embedding data in an audio signal” is asserted against the alleged use by Sony (and by several of its various subsidiaries) of Cinavia, a copy protection technology introduced by Verance over a decade ago, within certain Blu-Ray players and PlayStation consoles. MZ Audio pleads that the named inventors of the asserted patent, two University of Rochester professors, overcame shortfalls in the prior art by introducing audio watermarking “undetectable and robust to blind signal processing attacks and . . . uniquely robust to digital to analog conversion processing”.