BOSTON - The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a California company have filed a lawsuit in Texas, claiming that 94 companies - including Microsoft Corp. - illegally used their patented image editing software. <br>
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MIT says Electronics For Imaging Inc., of Foster City, Calif., has an exclusive license for the software, developed by MIT professor William Schreiber and used in products such as photo scanners and digital cameras. The patent expires this year. <br>
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In the lawsuit, filed last week in a federal court near an EFI office in Texarkana, Texas, EFI demands the other companies pay license fees for the past six years. An EFI spokesman would not say how much the fees are. <br>
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EFI won control of the patent in 1990 and has licensed it to 16 other companies, including Apple Computer Corp. and Xerox Corp. The software design firm shares the revenue with MIT. <br>
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Companies named in the lawsuit include Polaroid Corp., International Business Machines Inc. and Microsoft. <br>
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Microsoft and Polaroid spokesmen said in Saturday's editions of The Boston Herald that they hadn't seen the lawsuit and couldn't comment. Messages left by The Associated Press on Saturday for representatives of IBM and Polaroid were not immediately returned. <br>
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A Microsoft spokeswoman said Saturday she would have to check if officials had seen the lawsuit. <br>
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Polaroid spokesman Skip Colcord did not immediately return a call from The Associated Press on Saturday.
