Last week, Apple and Sorenson Media quietly put their respective lawsuits to bed. The Apple and Sorenson Media press releases are curt and identical, and suggest that they’ve agreed to be quietly bitter about the whole thing until the kids grow up and go away for college, at least.
Apple and Sorenson Media, Inc. today announced the settlement of a pending federal court lawsuit that had been brought by Apple in April, 2002. The settlement provides for the dismissal of all claims and counterclaims.
Apple sued Sorenson in April, after Sorenson’s Squeeze codec became Flash MX’s flashship video codec. Sorenson counter-sued in July, citing an February 2000 email from Steve Jobs that, according to Sorenson, demonstrated that Apple had “exclusive rights to past but not future versions of software codecs produced by Sorenson Media.”
The Sorenson Video codec became QuickTime’s flagship video codec with QuickTime 3. Without Sorenson Video, Apple would not have had a compelling solution for streaming video at that time. QuickTime 6’s Sorenson Video 3 codec remains QuickTime’s highest-quality video codec.