Imagine fires back against BigBand's lawsuit — So BigBand sues Imagine for patent infringement for video-processing and bandwidth-management techniques—before Imagine's initial product and technology have even been commercially deployed. As Imagine notes, BigBand's lawsuit is filed too early to allow BigBand to "properly know or understand the details of Imagine's yet-to-be released technology to form the basis for a lawsuit." So why did they do it? Imagine's guess?—
"The only conclusion we can reach is that they initiated this suit to upset Imagine's financings and slow down introduction of Imagine's superior technology. In fact, when we heard rumblings that a lawsuit might be filed, we initiated CEO-to-CEO discussions and invited BigBand's CTO to our lab facility to demonstrate our dramatically different and non-infringing technology. They refused our invitation and sued us anyway."
BigBand's response? To call its victim's comments "inflammatory" and to suggest that BigBand might sue them for making these comments too. Ah, good ole' capitalism-in-the-courtroom. The cornucopia of innovation spawned by the patent system can be seen clearly in action here.
