Intervideo sued Dell in August for patent infringement in the Northern District of California. Now it's filed a complaint with the ITC, including seeking an investigation and a cease-and-desist order. Dell partners Winbrook Computer and Cyberlink are also named in the complaint.

6,765,788 spawned from Taiwanese inventor Chia-Chaun Wu, and is assigned to Taiwanese company Mitac Technology. Intervideo owns rights to assert the patent.

'788 claims a hot key function for both PC's and other electronic devices, such as a DVD player.

Specific to the case is Intervideo's InstantOn software product, which affords interoperability between PCs and other consumer electronics equipment using a keyboard (which could include a remote control device). For example, InstantOn affords automatically playing a movie when a DVD disk is inserted into a computer. InstantOn also reputedly can be used to boot a PC in about ten seconds, far faster than the boot-up time for Windows.

Intervideo and Dell have tangoed before. Dell first signed a licensing agreement with Intervideo in 1999. In 2002, Intervideo settle a patent dispute with Dell by paying Dell 350,000 shares of Intervideo stock.

Part of the ITC's mission is grappling with patent disputes under Section 337 investigations. In a different patent-related case settled yesterday by the ITC, STMicro was found not to infringe a SanDisk patent for flash memory technology.