Sony pays out $40 million over patents

Sony has settled with Ampex for $40 million over patent litigation which relates to digital still and digital video cameras as well as PDAs. Back in July this year Ampex announced that it was aiming to block Sony from importing and selling products in the US which contained Ampex's intellectual property. Ampex has already come to license agreements with Canon, Sanyo and Kodak worth tens of millions of dollars. Ampex currently has outstanding litigation against Kodak for violation of the same patents. It looks as though Ampex will come out from these agreements with ongoing royalty payments too. Its patents related to "image storage and retrieval".

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