Sling Media faces patent lawsuit

A man who invented a system for transmitting audio signals from a home system to other devices through a wireless telephone network is suing Sling Media, makers of the Slingbox. Inventor Stuart Mershon says their devices, which lets you stream video from home theater devices like DVD players or PVRs over the internet to a computer, PDA, or mobile phone running SlingPlayer software.

On its face, these seem like two pretty different technologies. One is audio, the other is video. One relies on wireless technology, the other on wired (Slingbox requires an Ethernet connection. While I always figured that's because they weren't sure 802.11g provided a strong enough signal for streaming video, perhaps they were trying to avoid just such a lawsuit?).

Also, most of the claims in Mershon's patent relate to a "wireless speaker system," which I supposed could technically be the computer you're running SlingPlayer on, but I think that's really pushing it.