Some of the nation’s largest media companies were simultaneously hit with patent lawsuits over cloud technology this week. In virtually identically worded complaints against Time Warner’s CNN Interactive and Time, News Corp’s Fox News and Dow Jones — plus The New York Times, Reuters, USA Today owners Gannett and AOL’s the Huffington Post (read CNN complaint here) — patent owner Clouding claims the organizations are infringing two of their patents on mobile phone apps and websites.



“CNN has infringed and continues to infringe the ’481 patent by, among other things, making, using, offering for sale, selling and/or importing products and/or services in the United States that enable access to and manipulation of data using a pervasive device, such as a mobile phone, by receiving a data request from a pervasive device, obtaining the requested data, determining the available data manipulation operations and locations of such operations for the obtained data and returning the obtained data and the data manipulation operations and locations to the pervasive device. Such products and services include, but are not limited to, CNN’s websites, including cnn.com, and CNN’s mobile applications..,” says the complaint against CNN. The claim on the other patent is almost the same.

North Carolina-based Clouding says it was assigned one of the “Technique for Enabling Remote Data Access and Manipulation from a Pervasive Device” patents by software security company Symantec in 2005 and the other in 2007. The complaints filed this week are nothing new for Clouding. Earlier this year, the company launched similar patent infringement suits against Apple, Google, Oracle and Microsoft and other tech companies. Those actions are before the federal court in Delaware. While none of this week’s requests for a jury trial set a price for the damages Clouding seeks, they all ask for “a money judgment in an amount adequate to compensate for CNN’s infringement, but in no event less than a reasonable royalty for the use made of the invention by CNN, together with interest and costs as fixed by the Court.” The complaints also ask for a judgment that their patents were infringed and legal costs. Clouding IP is represented by Marc Fenster and Jordan Kushner of Los Angeles firm Russ August & Kabat and Richard Kirk, Stephen Brauerman and Vanessa Tiradentes of Wilmington, Delaware’s Bayard PA.