The lawsuit covers a suite of six patents for desktop, portable and server computers that had previously been licensed by eMachines, a South Korean maker of personal computers that Gateway acquired in January for $266 million to make it the third largest PC maker, behind Dell and Hewlett-Packard.

Compaq obtained the patents in a dispute before it was acquired by HP. The patents had been licensed previously by Compaq to eMachines, from 1994 to 1999, after two years of legal fighting in the early 1990s.

When Gateway acquired eMachines, Hewlett sought to terminate the licenses, maintaining it had the right to prevent them from passing to Gateway.

Source: The Washington Times