Alcatel sues Apple for illegal codecs use in its video products

Apple is being sued among other companies by the Alcatel-Lucent backed Multimedia Patent Trust (MPT) that submitted its filing with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California on Monday. The lawsuit accuses the Cupertino along with Canon, LG Electronics and TiVo of infringing MPT’s patents on video compression.

In case with Apple MPT is looking for royalty payments on "all video-capable products sold by Apple" that infringe on its patents, including Apple's MacBook laptops, iPhone smartphones and its Final Cut Software, according to the filing.

The patents mentioned in the lawsuit relate to video codecs, which are used to reduce the amount of data used to represent a digital video signal.

The MPT was established at the time of the merger between Alcatel and Lucent Technologies in 2006, and Lucent assigned some of its patent portfolio to MPT. While MPT now owns and controls those assets, the proceeds go to Alcatel-Lucent. MPT has in the past been involved in lawsuits with Microsoft, among others.