• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, July 8, 2024

Far from being a win for startup audience-measurement rival HyphaMetrics, Nielsen executives assert the recent dismissal of a Nielsen patent infringement suit was actually a win for Nielsen.

"HyphaMetrics agreed to not do the technologies that were at issue in the case," Nielsen General Counsel/Gracenote Sal Karottki said in an interview with MediaPost discussing redactions in the ruling.

While it declined to provide the verbatim language in the redactions, Karottki said he was free to disclose its substance and said the ruling was a "stipulated" dismissal initiated by a request from Nielsen, because HyphaMetrics agreed to stop using the patented technology that Nielsen claimed was being infringed.

Instead of utilizing Nielsen's patented technique for the technology -- which is capable of detecting whether a television is turned on or off while measuring households or people using it -- Karottki said HyphaMetrics agreed to use a "prior art," basically an older, non-patented technology, to do it.

"There’s plenty of ways to do audience measurement in the world," Karottki explained, citing old-school Nielsen pen and paper diaries as an example.

"One way is using the books, like Nielsen used to do, by having people write and we're not claiming we have a patent on, you now, people writing stuff in notebooks," he said, noting that the dismissed case, as well as another pending one it has against HyphaMetrics, are based on the infringement of explicitly patented Nielsen technologies.