Amazon.com sued by Discovery over Kindle device

On Tuesday Discovery Communications Inc., that provides the U.S. with cable and satellite programming, including the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet and operates a digital media business to deliver its programming trough the Internet and on mobile devices, filled a suit against Amazon.com Inc accusing the company that it was trading the popular reading device Kindle and Kindle 2 unfairly, violating an electronic book technology patent, awarded to Discovery in 2007.

Discovery is seeking an injunction against sales of the Kindle or unspecified future royalty payments as it believes that Amazon violated company’s intellectual property rights so it’s entitled to fair compensation. 

For Amazon the Kindle is a high-profile gambit which allows it to expand the market for electronic books. It says that there are more than 240,000 titles available for the device. The Kindle costs approximately $360, while Amazon sells related electronic books for $9.99 or less.

Interestingly, Discovery's patent lawsuit against Amazon is not the first instance of the Kindle. The previous month the Authors Guild said that the so-called "text-to-speech" feature included in the newest version of Kindle, which reads an electronic book aloud, may break the audiobooks copyrights. But later Amazon announced that it would make the Kindle's text-to-speech feature optional for individual titles, based on authors' preferences.