TomTom Countersues Microsoft

Late last month, I wrote about how Microsoft was taking TomTom to court over an in-car navigation patent violation.  Obviously TomTom wasn’t too happy about having to deal with this litigation, but now they have decided to countersue Microsoft over patent violations as well.  TomTom claims that Microsoft is infringing on three of their in-car navigation patents.

The three patents that TomTom is claiming that Microsoft is infringing upon are “Generating a Maneuver at the Intersection Through A Turn Lane” (5,902,350), “Route Generation in a Vehicle Navigation System” (5,938,720), and “Quick Selection of Destinations in an Automobile Navigation System” (6,660,994).

Microsoft sued TomTom last month over patents that cover the Microsoft FAT32 filesystem.  Since TomTom uses Linux, this is believed to be the first time that Microsoft has targetted a Linux-based system with patent violation litigation.  Microsoft could use the File Allocation Table (FAT) patents to do some serious damage to Linux if they chose to.

Analysts believe that the lawsuits will likely cancel each other out and Microsoft and TomTom both won’t be affected.  A settlement has to take place first.

[via Ars]

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