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PWInsider.com became aware this week of an ongoing lawsuit filed against WWE this past May when an amended complaint was filed on 9/14 in The United States District Court of Delaware.
Plaintiffs SITO Mobile R&D IP, LLC and SITO Mobile, Ltd. have alleged that WWE, via the WWE Network streaming service infrastructure, have violated SITO's existing patents related to a “System and Method for Routing Media.”
The lawsuit alleges:
On information and belief, and without SITO’s approval, authorization and license, WWE owns, controls, operates and uses a system for streaming media that includes the WWE Streaming Platform, as well as other WWE networks, systems, devices, components and/or services for streaming media, that practices and infringes the media streaming method recited in at least claim 49 of the ‘949 patent.
The plaintiffs are alleging that WWE is utilizing technology SITO have patented:
WWE streams videos using a network(s) of servers (“WWE Streaming Platform”). WWE uses Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH) and/or HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocols to stream video content. MPEG-DASH and HLS are HTTP-based adaptive bitrate streaming techniques that enable high quality streaming of media content over the Internet from web servers. The operation of MPEG-DASH and HLS are described in standards documents.
With MPEG-DASH and HLS, a video may be broken up into thousands of small HTTP-based file segments. Each segment contains a short interval of playback time of the video. The segments are encoded at a variety of different bit rates (speeds). After a video is selected to be streamed, the media player on the subscriber device is provided with a file that informs the player, amongst other things, how to obtain the segments sequentially and how to handle ad breaks (if any). As the video is playing, the subscriber device determines the bit rate that it can handle and requests a segment(s) encoded at that bit rate. The player plays the segments in sequential order and continuously requests segments until the player has received all of the segments that make up the video.
SITO alleges they have "been damaged by the direct infringement of WWE, and is suffering and will continue to suffer irreparable harm and damages as a result of this infringement" and are requesting a jury trial.
WWE has not yet responded to the amended complaint.
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