What does Discovery want?: Unlike some similar suits, Discovery isn’t seeking an injunction to halt sales or use of the technology. (If it’s successful with the suit, its payout will depend on those sales.) The company isn’t seeking a specific amount, either in damages or for licensing, since it has no knowledge yet of sales. The suit asks for a ruling that Amazon infringed on its patent, damages to cover that infringement if the ruling goes its way, a continuing royalty in lieu of an injunction, legals fees and a few other line items.

More on the patent: This is an unusual situation for Discovery, which wouldn’t even make my top 1,000 list of companies that might sue over a patent. In fact, this particular patent has been licensed only once, as part of a patent portfolio, and that was to TVGateway, an interactive TV joint venture involving several cable operators. I haven’t been able to get through the entire 55-page patent yet but while it is video-centric—not surprising given it stems from Hendrick’s efforts with Your Choice TV—it covers alternate means of distribution. It also talks about “a portable book-shaped viewer” which “is used for secure viewing of text.”

Multichannel News talked to Hendricks back in 2002 about the intellectual property potential from the various patents related to Your Choice, including menu-driven search. His answer then is a little at odds with today’s events: “We’re just using it in a friendly fashion. There are some people—I’m not going to name names—but they’re trying to make a business of suing people, and trying to extract license rights. So we can provide a lot of distributors with some immunity because some of our patent rights predate some of the other players.”

Discovery Communications Complaint