Acadia Streaming Patent Contested

Anonymous Coward writes "Since last year Acadia Research has sent hundreds of letters to various porn web sites to arrange royalty deals, picking on the small fry before trying to take on well-heeled companies such as Disney. However, many small fries refused, and now 40 firms have joined forces and are embroiled in a suit with Acadia. Fish & Richardson (a prominent intellectual property law firm) have taken their case. The best part? CEO Paul Ryan's obvious sour-grapes-syndrome, he goes from describing the web porn industry as a "billion-dollar industry" where the money is to a "sideshow" that's "maybe 1% of our potential revenues". Check it out here"

Comments

Forbes

[leviramsey]

This isn't the first Forbes anti-excessive patents article they've run... as a matter of fact, I've seen links to a couple already on Slashdot. Could Steve Forbes be pushing for patent reform to be a Republican plank in '04 (especially if he decides to run again...)?

yet one...

[deadsaijinx*]

more case of Patents gone crazy. The patent office was designed to protect ones ideas and STIMULATE growth, not to allow people to suddenly restrict the use of a VERY commonpractice. I can't say that I'm too pleased with their lawsuit, but I do appreciate the nuances. If I created something, I'd sure as hell want to keep it protected and to earn royalties. Yet at the same time, this is abusing the system. They have a patent on something. That something becomes common practice. That patent becomes lucrative. Company suddenly goes after people using common practice. And they go really low, because they beleive that the porn industry, made of lots o lil fishes, won't be able to defend themselves. After all, the court will just frown down on these "dispicable" people (hey, everyone needs to make a living).

I am all for patents, and for protecting your ideas. but I am also for the expansion of ideas and the advancement of us all. So poo-on-you Acadia!

Re:yet one...

[gregmac]

That sounds like the situation with trademarks today: if your trademark is infringed, and you don't defend it, you lose it. That's how we ended up with companies being ridiculously overzealous about trademarks.

So? Is this really a bad thing in regards to patents? If you don't defend your patent, and over the next few years you start getting companies, formats and standards that are actually infringing your non-enforced patent, how is it fair to say you still have a right to it? You'd suddenly be putting companies out of business (RealNetworks would be hard-pressed to survive without streaming media, for one). You'd be forcing open-source initatives to pay royalties they obviously can't afford (Ogg can stream).

So yes, if you don't enforce your patent, you should lose rights to it. Basing your business model on a misuse of the patent system - namely, making an obscure patent, waiting years for enough people to violate that patent without knowing, and then suddenly bringing them all to court and get a big payoff - should not be allowed.

The only way out is not to issue overbroad patents.

Yes, that's true. But there are many many problems with this. Often the patent office doesn't have people with enough knowledge to decide if a patent is too broad or not. Often patents are filed on new research where there are only a couple of people in the world that know enough about it to decide if it's overly broad - and those are the people filing the patent.

So really, it becomes impossible to stop these patents from being filed. Instead, it should be rememebered that the patent system is designed to protect intellectual property, and not a place to make money by basically using entrapment.

Failed Business Models

[TuballoyThunder]

A quote that I found interesting in the article was:

Acacia Research reported a net loss last year of $29.6 million on sales that plummeted to $882,000, from $24.6 million the previous year. If nothing else, the stock is a screaming bargain. The market values the entire company at just 43% of the $55 million Acacia has on hand in cash and cash equivalents. "All I know is I've been buying a lot of stock lately," Ryan says gamely.

It seems to me that the business model of getting vague or overly broad patents does not provide a steady income stream. If you go to their web site you find that they still list their V-chip technology (even though they lost a patent enforcement case--guess the patent was not that important) and their biochip technology (also a loser in the courts).

The bottom line is that there is a desperate need for patent reform. My first suggestion is a peer review process. Technology specialization has gotten to the point where I do not think a fulltime patent clerk can stay current in a field. Second, the patent process must be completed in a short timeframe. If you cannot provide a clear patent right away, then you probably do not have good idea. The current patent process has a disclosure document program that can be used to help establish precedent. It even provides for a patent pending. IMHO those two concepts provide sufficient protection of an idea. The purpose of a finite timeframe is to reduce the number of submarine patents.

A dissenting opinion to my view can be found here.

Re:Use It Or Lose It

[Steven Blanchley]

I know that our current patent system is set up so that, if you don't defend your patent for a certain amount of time, you can't just come back and start attempting to enforce it.

You must be thinking of trademarks; see my comment on that. Patents cannot be lost by neglect to defend them. However, it may happen that the patent cannot be enforced in a certain case.

If company B has been infringing company A's patent for five years, and company A knew about it all along, and then suddenly decides to sue over it, B can use as a defense that, in effect, A's ignorage of the infringement excused it.

But if company C then comes along and infringes the same patent for the first time, A would still be able to enforce the patent on C. So patents are never lost completely, only partially under certain circumstances.

Also, this kind of situation doesn't tend to come up very often.