According to www.broadcastingcable.com Discovery Comminications is filing a law suit against Amazon for patent infringement related to “secure, encrypted system for the selection, transmission, and sale of electronic books” (used in Amazon Kindle and Kindle 2). The patent in question was issued on November, 20 2007 – one day after Kindle US launch. Currently Amazon declined any comments.
Looks like more and more people realize that there is money in eBooks and market is growing day-by-day. Now suddenly everyone wants a piece of this pie. Just recently Authors Guild threatened to sue Amazon over text-to-speech feature in Kindle 2. Then it was Amazon sending “cease and desist” letters to MobileRead.com and possibly other websites about script that allowed books purchased from eBooks vendors other than Amazon to be read on Kindle.
As the market will grow more I’m sure we’ll see more turf wars like this one. As for patents… nowadays for any given thing you can find someone who holds a patent and “believes that he/she is entitled for compensation“…