Affiliates of Dolby Laboratories Inc. hit San Jose-based Adobe Systems Inc. with a copyright and licensing lawsuit Monday claiming that Adobe has been underpaying for the Dolby audio-processing technology it uses in its software. The lawsuit, filed by Dolby’s lawyers at King & Spalding in federal court in San Francisco, claims that Adobe has for years scuttled Dolby’s efforts to audit Adobe’s sales to determine how much it’s due.
“Notwithstanding having enforced hundreds of audits of its own licensees, and notwithstanding providing to Dolby repeated assurances that it would comply with its audit obligations, for over three years Adobe employed various tactics to frustrate Dolby’s right to audit Adobe’s inclusion of Dolby technologies in Adobe’s products,” wrote the King & Spalding lawyers, who include Timothy Scott, the managing partner of the firm’s Silicon Valley office, and Bruce Baber, who represented Google in both its copyright trial showdowns with Oracle.
