[Mike AI]

There is a lot of interesting reading on the Yahoo group:

technical expert on this topic
by: dope_fx (27/M/My Nehbohood)
Long-Term Sentiment: Sell 10/18/03 02:16 am
Msg: 22492 of 23044

Make sure to read it all and not pick it apart the bits and pieces to try and make your arguments hold water. Acacia is screwed and that is fact their patent is not worth the paper which it was printed and they waited far to long to enforce it regardless.

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Company tries to lay claim to streaming patents
By Jason Meserve
Network World Fusion, 01/02/03

Acacia Research Corp. is attempting to make money the old fashioned way - lawsuits. The company claims its patent on Digital Media Transmission covers just about all streaming media and now its trying to enforce the patent to collect royalties. Acacia is first going after Internet porn sites, known for their cutting edge (and profitable) use of new Web technologies. While some may argue that waiting until a technology becomes really big before enforcing a patent is bad business, big online streaming players such as Radio Free Virgin are ponying up the dough to keep Acacia at bay.



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Comments
Read the posting about the Acacia Research patent. I'd like to provide some relevant information that I hope will help the businesses involved in this patent licensing shakedown. I've produced a 17-page bibliography (in MS Word format) that contains the abstracts for many pre-1992 technical publications regarding internet audio and video, live or VOD. These document references may provide all of the legal evidence needed to invalidate the Acacia video related patents. (Plz email me if you'd like a copy of the bibilography.

If you are not familiar with patent law, in order to meet the novelty requirement for a U.S. patent, an invention must not have been known or used by others in this country before the applicant invented it. The invention also must not have been patented or described in a printed publication in the U.S. or a foreign country before the applicant invented it. These documents are called "prior art" and show that a patented invention is either not new or is obvious and is therefore not eligible for patent protection. Those publications invalidate any and all U.S. patents that were filed one year after the document was published and that claims as an invention ANY of the subject matter that was disclosed in those documents.

So how do I know about the internet digital media technology and related patents? I was employed as a principal scientist by one the pioneers of internet content delivery, InterVU. I was the geek responsible for the design, development and deployment of the first commercial content delivery network. I'm also a co-author of one of the InterVU patents related to content delivery over the internet. ( Hey, those InterVU patents and the technology proved to extremely valuable. InterVU, the content delivery network and the patent portfolio were purchased in 2000 by a company called Akamai for $2.8 BILLION dollars! Yeah, wow, unreal...)

So being a net nerd for almost three decades now, I figure I'm fully qualified as a technical expert on this topic. Some of the relevant documents I discovered were published as far back as the 1970's. In my professional opinion, there is very little, if any, technical validity for the Acacia patent infringement claims.

I sincerely hope the document abstracts can help you with legal battle against Acacia Research. Please let me know if I can be of any other assistance to you and the other unfortunate folks caught up in this litigation nightmare.

best regards,

buck

Posted by: buckminster on January 24, 2003 06:08 AM