Alcatel-Lucent has sharpened its spears and started a new lawsuit campaign. They are demanding royalties for usage of digital video compression standards from Apple, Canon, LG and TiVo. The lawsuits have been filed via the subsidiary company Multimedia Patent Trust in a San Diego federal court. This could mean that royalties would have to be paid on every device that can make digital videos. An interesting observation about the scenario is presented as follows:

There’s already a group—MPEG-LA—that’s been set up to collect royalties on all relevant digital video patents, and distribute the proceeds to the dozens of patent owners in that space. All companies that want to make devices that have digital video abilities, from DVD players to iPads to desktop computers, already pay into the MPEG-LA patent pool. But that doesn’t stop other patent holders, such as Alcatel-Lucent in this case, from coming around many years after those negotiations have been completed and asking for several years’ worth of royalty payments. That practice has led to a problem that some in the patent world call “royalty stacking.”

This is not the only patent lawsuit case that’s come of the mobile revolution. Recently, we have seen many companies coming forward and claiming royalties via lawsuits. Microsoft and Apple rivalry is at its peak in their recent patent lawsuit. Google and Motorola have their own separate lawsuits against Microsoft. Microsoft is not the only target here, Motorola have another patent infringement lawsuit filed against Apple. Sometimes it gets way too confusing about who is suing who; here is an infographic that clarifies the big picture.