Acacia's mass letter campaign

[Dravyk]

From today's XBiz article/interview with Acacia:

Berman dismissed the suggestion that this recent letter-writing campaign is a new tactic on Acacia's part to either increase licensing profits or partake in what many industry insiders are calling "double-dipping."

The idea of double-dipping is if the sponsor has paid Acacia and the affiliate has also paid Acacia. But according to Berman, Acacia only requires both the affiliate and the sponsor to pay for licenses if there is a separate infringing act in the use of Acacia's technology by one of the affiliate's sites that is streaming audio/video.

The breakdown for sponsors and affiliates who are unclear about whether or not they need to license from Acacia is confusing, but deals only with sites that are transmitting or receiving audio/video content.

According to Berman, if a webmaster has their own audio/video content that is accessed from their site, then plain and simply they need a license, whether they are a free site or a paysite and regardless of whether they send traffic to other Acacia licensees or not.

If that site doesn't have audio/video but sends traffic to a sponsor site that does have streaming media, but no license, then that site needs a license from Acacia. If that sponsor signs up with Acacia later on, then the affiliate does not have to pay royalties on the revenues received from the Acacia-licensed sponsor.

So according to them, we either take down links to every one (every sponsor, plugin provider, cams or movie sponsor, etc.) who has not settled with them, otherwise we are "contributors to infringement"?

Is there any legal basis in this seemingly smouldering pile of bull shit? (Seriously, would like an answer if anyone has one.) Or do they just make this up as they go along?

As far as I know, linking to something that links to something that links to something was thrown out in a variety of court cases years ago. Otherwise the Web would cease to exist as that is what it does. And the courts (of multiple countries) recognized this.




Last edited by Dravyk at Oct 28 2003, 08:41 PM