Intellectual Ventures sues three US mobile telcos

Intellectual Ventures, a privately held patent holding company co-founded by a former Microsoft executive, sued three of the four top US mobile providers for patent infringement.

The company accused AT&T, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile USA of fifteen counts of infringements of patents related to their wireless network services in a lawsuit filed at the U.S. District Court of Delaware. It said that the operators had infringed on its patents either alone or in conjunction with each other through their interoperability agreements including those involving swapping of multi-media messages between their customers.