Damn, that is a fascinating legal discourse from someone who knows what they're talking about. Hats off to you sir. I'm following this story not only because of its relevance to start-ups and IP in general but also because it's techcrunch. On similar note, what can you make of his claims about a third-party owning much of the technical IP? If true, will they be shortly filing a claim?
From what I can see, the story is far too murky to make any intelligent observations about third-party IP rights at this point.
Generally speaking, if a third-party contractor did work on the project, that party could potentially have IP rights to its work, but not if it did so as a work-for-hire and assigned rights to whoever retained it. If there were no work-for-hire or IP assignments, then any contractor that might have done software development or hardware design could potentially assert infringement claims if its IP is used without benefit of a license agreement to the party using it.
Without further details, though, it is impossible to assess this.
I'm also interested in the 3rd party business (and grellas' thoughts on it). It's highly confusing exactly what has been developed or licensed - and by whom. So far no one (not even DG) have tried to explain all this in full (the current post being the furthest we have)
the stuff about Asus would indicate to me that either Arrington is an even bigger idiot than he appears to be or is trying to bluff his way through this. If Asus actually did have legal action in the pipeline Arrington would be an idiot to talk about it. Talking about his own suit on his own website is fine, talking about other, unpublicized suits?
